voice.

The weather had turned raw and chilly again with the renewed rain. Sophy
shivered suddenly as she sat reading. Anne Harding, who was tidying a
little medicine chest on a table near by, noticed this.

"Can't I fetch you a shawl, Mrs. Chesney?" she asked, looking up with
her alert black eyes.

"Thanks; but wouldn't you like a fire lit, Cecil?" Sophy asked. "You're
so fond of a fire in your bedroom. I can't think why Gaynor hasn't seen
to it."

"I don't care for a fire," said Chesney curtly. "Being in bed is stuffy
work as it is."

He lay nearly always in bed now.

"But, Cecil, you're so used to it. I'm afraid being in a damp room like
this may give you cold. It isn't as if you were accustomed to doing
without fire. Please let Nurse----"

"Don't nag!" he said, quite roughly this time. "I can look after my own
wants. I'm not quite incompetent yet."

Sophy glanced at the nurse, still anxious. She thought Anne Harding's
eyes had a rather queer expression--startled.

"Don't you agree with me, Nurse?" she asked.

Anne lowered her eyes and busied herself again with the little chest.

"I don't think it matters," she said, "if Mr. Chesney really prefers it
this way."

"Do get on with your reading, Sophy," broke in Cecil impatiently.

Sophy took up the book again, and Anne Harding went to Tilda for a
scarf, which she returned with and put over Sophy's shoulders.

As she left the room, finally this time, she glanced keenly at the empty
fireplace. She thought she had a clue.

XXIII

That night, about one o'clock, as Chesney lay heavily asleep under the
influence of two grains of morphia (he only dared to take these large
doses when night was coming on), the little nurse, Brownie-like and
cat-foot in her grey flannel wrapper and felt shoes, stole into the
room. Gaynor slept in his master's dressing-room on a cot. Anne had been
given a room just opposite. The night-light burned behind a screen as in
London, and over the ceiling spread huge, grotesque shadows from chairs
and tables--shadows that were a horror to Chesney, in the gruesome
intervals between dose and dose. They seemed solid then, those
shadows--informed with a weird life. They hung bat-like from his
ceiling, waiting to drop down on him. Morphia gives the sick,
unreasoning fear that comes only in dreams--the kind of fear that will
seize one in such dreams--at the sight of a grey, spotted leaf shaken by
a wind--or the slow opening of a do