"You forget, my little Bush-Queen," Chesney said, still smiling, "there's no such thing as honour among morphinomaniacs. You've told me that yourself, often enough, my Poppet, have you not?"
"Shame! Shame!" she cried, with passion. "Here you are, through the worst—and you won't even promise that you'll keep on! My word! I don't believe I'll come back, no matter how you act!"
"'Suit yourself,' Bush-lass," Chesney returned coolly, quoting one of her favourite expressions.
Anne went to Sophy before leaving—went to her bedroom and under the unusual excitement of her double anxiety over parent and patient, seized the slender white hands in her little skinny brown ones, wringing them eagerly to accentuate her passionate words of warning.
"Watch him yourself—yourself!" she begged. "Don't trust him a moment—not though he swore on the head of his own son. He means mischief. I know him by now. I know him as only a nurse who's tussled through the worst of the morphia craze with a man can know him. Don't leave him to Gaynor, or his mother, or even Doctor Bellamy. I don't know what sort of nurse they'll send you. She may be good, or she may be a chump. But"—the little spurt of very human vanity became her eager, cocky face—"but there's not many Anne Hardings," she wound up. "I give you that for what it's worth, Mrs. Chesney. Forgive my tooting my own trumpet."
Sophy promised, feeling scared and forlorn again, now that this strong little being was going. She had come to depend on her as the one means of Cecil's salvation. Now she was going. Menace, dark and formless, seemed to waver like an evil shadow on the dreary walls of Dynehurst. How could one grapple with a shadow? Only Anne Harding knew the magic tune to which evil shadows danced obedience.
The little nurse left within an hour after receiving the telegram, and Sophy went to her husband as soon as the carriage drove from the door. Anne had turned over her charts to her, with the hypodermic syringes and morphia. As the nurse had instructed, she locked everything away before leaving her room. Between every dose they must be locked away again. No slightest risk must be run, in the interval between Anne's departure and the arrival of the new nurse.
When Sophy had faltered that she did not know how to give a hypodermic injection, Anne had exclaimed almost impatiently: "Oh, he can do that, himself—only too well! All you've got to do is to clean it thoroughly the way I've showed you, each time afterwards. I don't want Gaynor to begin it, because one at a time is enough in such things, and you are the one to leave in charge. You've got character—grit." She looked at Sophy impartially out of her shrewd, black eyes. "I don't believe you know, yourself, how much character you have got," she said. "You're too young and beautiful to have had much chance yet—but this is forming you. Forgive my Bush-girl bluntness—but there's no better character-maker than a husband one's trying to save from morphia. You'll come out of it a sort of soldier-saint. Mark my words: Happiness is mush," said the little nurse, running her words together in her excitement. "One can't get strong on mush. Now life's feeding you meat—a bit raw and bloody, maybe—but it'll build up brawn—soul-brawn. I'm mixing things; but you understand, I know. And, my word! Just think, Mrs. Chesney: if a woman forgets her travail for joy that a man is born into the world, what must she feel when a man—her man—is reborn through her pangs! Forgive me—I'm being too free. But you're so rare—oh, I've watched you, same as I've watched him! And I want you to win out—I lust for it—for you to win out with him. You'll feel you've got the world in a sling then—I give you my word you will, Mrs. Chesney. Only keep a stiff upper lip. Don't give in to him. Don't let him fool you. The watchword is 'Suspicion.' Don't trust him—not if he seems dying. Let him die before you trust him for one second! Bless you, dear lady! I do hate to leave you all alone with it.... Good-bye."
And she was gone before Sophy could even utter some kind wishes about Mrs. Harding's recovery.