"But I'm going to try the effect of this new antiseptic dressing, I want to see if it does harm or not."
I opened my eyes and looked up at his hard, thin-lipped face, and he seemed somewhat disconcerted; but only jabbed his probe in a little deeper and remarked jocularly:
"Ah, I see, you're tougher than I thought."
More oblivion, and when I next came to I knew that they had both been carried away from me and buried—Hop Lee, and his wife beside him, and that that chapter in my life was, for ever and ever, closed.
Now I was in charge of a hospital nurse. A horrible creature she was, lean and hard-faced, with a straight slit across her face for mouth, and little grey, cruel eyes. Like a nightmare she hung round my bed, preventing me from getting better.
All the fiendish tortures and cruelties that she had witnessed within the hospital walls had, I suppose, made her the thing she was.
Days had passed, and very slowly a little strength had crept back into me, enough for me to see I was not getting well as quickly as my youth and strength would let me if there were no drawback. I drew all my forces together to try and understand this, and then I noticed that regularly after each dose of physic I went back a little.
More fever, more pain in my shoulder, more delusions before the brain. Each morning when the vitality within me had struggled through the evil effects of my medicine I was better, then came the harpy-faced nurse to the pillow—my dose—then pain and illness again.
The look on the face of the woman as I drank it was extraordinary. A sly, pleased look, as one sees on the face of a schoolboy dismembering a living fly.
One day I took the glass as usual from her, but instead of raising it to my lips, turned it upside down through the window.