though the heavy, drugged sleep resulting
from it might drag on for some hours after. The least sound or touch was
sufficient to rouse him now. After lighting the coffee machine, she
decided to open the shutters. The cold, raw daylight would have a
wholesomely chilling effect, should he show a tendency to become
violent. Braver than many soldiers, the little nurse went from one
window to the other of the large bedroom, throwing wide the shutters and
fastening them back. A gale was whipping the great boughs of the trees,
the rain blew in upon her, spotting the bosom of her dress and her fresh
apron-bib and cap. It was like a bleak September day, and it seemed
strange to see green leaves instead of yellow ones flying through the
air.

"And this is June. What a beastly climate!" thought the little
Australian.

Then she turned, drying her face and hands with her handkerchief. As she
expected, Chesney was watching her from his pillow. His face, grey with
morphia and glistening like wet clay with the odious sweat that follows
on an exhausted dose, looked more deathly than a corpse's clear, waxen
mask.

"What o'clock is it?" he asked, speaking thickly with his pasty tongue
and dried lips.

"Ten after five," said Anne Harding briskly. "You'll be wanting a cup of
coffee, I fancy, sir."

"Isn't it time for ... for the ... er ... usual ... thing, yet?" He
could never bring himself, in these moments of weakness and horrible,
faint desire, to name the drug plainly.

"Your allowance of morphia?"

Anne did not mean to spare him. She glanced down at her bracelet. How
Chesney hated that tyrannical watch on the nurse's thin wrist! It seemed
like some horrible wen, or tumour, to him. Until she had fussed over him
and gone he could not get the stuff out of the chimney-place--the stuff
which was now simply and literally life to him.

"Not due for twenty minutes yet, sir," she said cheerfully, glancing up
again. "But I'll just bathe your face and hands and bring you the
coffee. It'll be ready by then. I'll tidy you a bit, sir, then fetch
it."

There was nothing for it but submission. Sometimes, on these occasions,
Chesney ran over in his mind horrid ways in which he would "pay back"
this little woman for the misery she made him endure in such moments,
should he ever get her wholly in his power.

She "tidied" him deftly, plumped up his pillows as he liked them, and
fetched the coffee. When he had drunk it (black and strong Anne