ly do more harm than good if its properties become general
knowledge. But the Home Office is drafting a comprehensive measure for
State control of the manufacture and distribution of injurious drugs.
You all know that the growth of the drug habit caused serious alarm in
the early days of the war, and that even the amendment to the Defence of
the Realm Act, forbidding the unauthorised sale and possession of
cocaine and other poisons, did little to diminish the illicit traffic.
Such contrabrand dealing is immensely lucrative, and prices rise in
direct ratio with the danger. But the new Bill may contain a clause
vesting in the State the formulae and the manufacture of all
newly-discovered drugs of this kind. The Government is relying in this
matter greatly upon the experience and advice of Sir Randal, and if a
sufficiently stringent clause can be devised, it is probable that never
more than three living persons, in addition to the discoverer, will be
acquainted with the processes necessary to the manufacture of a newly
discovered chemical compound which has been brought under State control.
In regard to the good which may be done by Ambrotox--do you remember,
Amaryllis, the two pretty little old ladies who lived in the small grey
house with the red blinds? Don't say names, my child, nor mention the
town. They were sisters and devotedly attached."

The girl's face was a picture of curiosity.

"Yes, father," she said. "And they grew pale and anxious. One of them
came to see you, and then the other, several times; and once, just
before I went to Scotland, they both came together. I remember how
dreadfully ill they looked. But when I came home, their cheeks were pink
again, one always laughed when the other did, and their garden was full
of roses."

"What about 'em?" asked Dick.

"This," said Caldegard: "For several years each of those old women had
been taking morphia; each had been concealing it from the other; each
had suffered in conscience the torture of the damned; each confessed to
me her vice, and the dreadful failure of her struggle to overcome it.
Experimentally I treated each with Ambrotox, in gradually decreasing
doses. The return to health was quicker and more complete than I had
dared to hope; the craving for morphia has not reappeared, and I do not
think it will."

"Oh, you darling!" cried Amaryllis. "I always thought you'd something to
do with it."

"It is the story of two cases only, I admit," continued