ng," said Sophy reproachfully, that vivid colour still
in her face, "a hypodermic syringe-case isn't a thing that can be hidden
away easily. You've told me that you've looked everywhere. Isn't it
rather cruel to be suspicious to this extent?"

"Mrs. Chesney," said Anne Harding, her black eyes like little gems with
hard, cruelly-kind astuteness. "If the angel Gabriel was given me for a
morphia patient, _I'd pluck his wings_--for fear he'd hide the nasty
stuff among the feathers!"

She was a character, was Anne Harding, so utterly unlike any English
nurse that Sophy had ever seen before, that she wondered whether indeed
she could really be English. Anne was very quick at following the
probabilities of thought-sequence, for she smiled suddenly her childish
smile, that contrasted so oddly with the almost elf-like shrewdness of
her eyes, and said:

"Pray forgive my speaking that way. I come from the Bush, you know. I'm
an Australian. We've a blunt sort of way of speaking out there."

Chesney was quite amiable with the little nurse. He knew of course that
she suspected him, but the very fact that he had so entirely outwitted
her made him feel a sort of grim pleasure in her presence.

"She's a good little rat," he said to Sophy. "Not over-burdened with
brains, though."

And he smiled his secretive smile.

"Give me just one week longer, Doctor Bellamy, and I'll find it-- I'll
find it or give up nursing!" Anne Harding pleaded. But Bellamy
determined to speak with frankness to Chesney himself. He went to his
room that day and said without preliminary ado:

"Chesney, for your own sake I'm going to take the liberty of being
brutally frank. What I think you're doing is only a regular symptom of
your ailment. Here goes, then: Haven't you another hypodermic and
morphia in your possession?"

Chesney eyed him cruelly.

"It's a queer profession--yours," he said. "It gives a little chap like
you courage to insult a big man--just because he happens to be ill and
therefore weak, for the moment."

Bellamy looked at him without changing countenance.

"I was afraid you'd take it this way-- I wish you wouldn't. The very way
you're acting now is a symptom."

"You don't seem able to remove these symptoms," said Chesney, with his
slight, mocking grin.

"I can't--unless you help me. It's in your own hands, you know. You've
always reminded me of a lion, Chesney. Now you make me think of a lion
that gnaws off its own paw to get out