As the nurse set the box upon her knees, Sophy looked so ghastly that Anne exclaimed:
"Oh, pray, pray, Mrs. Chesney, don't take it so hard! It's for his good we're doing it—to save him."
"Yes," said Sophy.
With a firm gesture she thrust the key suddenly into the small spring-lock and turned it. As she felt the lid rise beneath her hand, it seemed to her as though she had by this act shared his degradation—drawn part of it into her own blood. With her slender, nobly shaped hands she began to search among the letters and documents.—Nothing. The colour began to rise again into her white face. Eagerly she turned the contents out upon her lap. Nothing. Nothing.
"You see!" she cried, her tone was almost joyous. "There's nothing of the kind—you were mistaken! There's nothing—nothing!"
Anne frowned. Then she said soberly:
"Well, I've got to find it—somehow. It's wonderful their cleverness at hiding the stuff."
"But, Nurse Harding," said Sophy reproachfully, that vivid colour still in her face, "a hypodermic syringe-case isn't a thing that can be hidden away easily. You've told me that you've looked everywhere. Isn't it rather cruel to be suspicious to this extent?"
"Mrs. Chesney," said Anne Harding, her black eyes like little gems with hard, cruelly-kind astuteness. "If the angel Gabriel was given me for a morphia patient, I'd pluck his wings—for fear he'd hide the nasty stuff among the feathers!"
She was a character, was Anne Harding, so utterly unlike any English nurse that Sophy had ever seen before, that she wondered whether indeed she could really be English. Anne was very quick at following the probabilities of thought-sequence, for she smiled suddenly her childish smile, that contrasted so oddly with the almost elf-like shrewdness of her eyes, and said: