lirium tremens.'

They had three miles to travel, and not another word was spoken on the
road; but as they passed the doctor's house a voice called out to him,
and the driver pulled up.

'Stay with me a moment, Mr. Armstrong,' said Laurent 'I will but give
this man an ordonnance for the pharmacien, and I will be with you. Drive
home, Victor!'

The carriage rattled off; the doctor, the messenger, and Paul stood at
the kerb for a minute or so. The carriage rumbled into the distance; a
window was heard to open and to dose. Laurent took Paul's arm, and they
walked together without a word until they came in front of the window
of the room which Paul had used as a study. The blind was up, a lamp was
lit, and the whole room was visible from the roadway.

'Mon Dieu!' said Laurent in a whisper.

Annette was there in her nightdress, looking from side to side like
a hunted creature. A decanter stood upon the table. She approached it
crouching, seized it with one hand, took a tumbler in the other, and
three times poured and three times drank as if the draught were water;
then she glided away and closed the door behind her.

CHAPTER XVIII

For any and every episode of his life save this, Paul, when he chose to
think about it, could make a fairly expressive picture in his mind, and
could bring back something of the emotion of the time. Here he could
remember only that Laurent clutched him by the arm, and that he turned
on Laurent with something of the vague appeal for aid which might be
imagined in the mind of a frightened child. He saw that a thousand signs
which he should have recognised had escaped him, and in the flush of
real apprehension which followed this thought he seemed to himself to
have been almost wilfully blind to the truth. There were so many things
which might have guided him, and he had taken warning by none of them.

'I beg your pardon, old chap,' he said to Laurent, speaking
unconsciously in English, 'but I'm a little bit upset. You would not
mind lending me your arm inside?'

'Assuredly not,' cried Laurent, still supporting him; and the two men
entered the hotel together.

The Solitary still remembered how his clumsy footsteps seemed to fumble
at the stone stairs, and the very pressure of Laurent's arm upon his
own shoulder was still a living sensation with him; yet for the actual
moment thought and sensation alike seemed to have been abolished.
Laurent, when the study had once been reached, hel