urs when the fractional doses of the drug were to
be given him, and to which he looked forward as to bits of life in the
slow, grey deathliness that enfolded him. At times his nervousness, the
anguish of morbid desire, was far more acute than at others. On these
occasions Anne had been used, after observing him narrowly, to give him
the prescribed amount, sometimes even an hour before the due time.
Again, she would say with rough kindliness:

"Well, will you brace up and go without for, say two extra hours next
time, if I give you a crumb more than you really ought to have?"

These concessions of his little tyrant so wrought on both the gratitude
and the pride of the man, whom morphia had reduced to a certain
childlike weakness, that he, on his part, would sometimes stretch the
interval of abstinence even longer than she had required. When,
therefore, he found himself, all at once, in the unyielding straitjacket
of Sophy's conscientious care, rebellion began to glow in him like a
fever. Once he had tried to explain to her Anne's more elastic methods;
but though Sophy met him very sweetly, he saw the little shock that had
flitted through her eyes. She suspected him of trying to coax her with
plausible lies. Had not Anne warned her not to trust him? The little
nurse had chiefly meant that she must not trust him by leaving the drug
in the remotest way accessible to him; but then Anne could not have
instructed Sophy to practise her own leniency. It was one of those
situations to which the word "fatal" can be well applied.

A second time, when suffering from one of his severe headaches, in
addition to the horrid, chill, damp nervousness, Chesney had again
ventured (sullenly angry at the enforced humility of his attitude) to
suggest that she give him a slightly larger dose, skipping the next dose
entirely, if she wished.

Sophy's look had been full of frank reproach and grief this time. "Ah,
Cecil! How can you ask me such a thing?" she had exclaimed. She had come
and knelt beside him, taking his clammy hand, which resisted the clasp
of the smooth, warm fingers so full of health and love. "Don't you know
it's because I love you that I must refuse? Why do you look at me so
angrily? You asked me to do this for you, dear. I'm only doing what you
_asked_ me to...."

But he had jerked his hand roughly away. He hated her at that moment.
"She'll drive me to it, with her smug self-righteousness ... ignorant,
sentimental fool!" He