’Clodagh, your presence at the bed-side here somehow does not please me.  It is so unnecessary.’

‘Unnecessary certainly,’ she replied:  ’but I always had a genius for nursing, and a passion for watching the battles of the body.  Since no one objects, why should you?’

’Ah!...  I don’t know.  This is a case that I dislike.  I have half a mind to throw it to the devil.’

‘Then do so.’

‘And you, too—­go home, go home, Clodagh!’

’But why?—­if one does no harm.  In these days of “the corruption of the upper classes,” and Roman decadence of everything, shouldn’t every innocent whim be encouraged by you upright ones who strive against the tide?  Whims are the brakes of crimes:  and this is mine.  I find a sensuous pleasure, almost a sensual, in dabbling in delicate drugs—­like Helen, for that matter, and Medea, and Calypso, and the great antique women, who were all excellent chymists.  To study the human ship in a gale, and the slow drama of its foundering—­isn’t that a quite thrilling distraction?  And I want you to get into the habit at once of letting me have my little way——­’

Now she touched my hair with a lofty playfulness that soothed me:  but even then I looked upon the rumpled bed, and saw that the man there was really very sick.

I have still a nausea to write about it!  Lucrezia Borgia in her own age may have been heroic:  but Lucrezia in this late century!  One could retch up the heart...

The man grew sick on that bed, I say.  The second week passed, and only ten days remained before the start of the expedition.

At the end of that second week, Wilson, the electrician, was one evening sitting by Peter’s bedside when I entered.

At the moment, Clodagh was about to administer a dose to Peters; but seeing me, she put down the medicine-glass on the night table, and came toward me; and as she came, I saw a sight which stabbed me:  for Wilson took up the deposited medicine-glass, elevated it, looked at it, smelled into it:  and he did it with a kind of hurried, light-fingered stealth; and he did it with an under-look, and a meaningness of expression which, I thought, proved mistrust....

Meantime, Clark came each day.  He had himself a medical degree, and about this time I called him in professionally, together with Alleyne of Cavendish Square, to consultation over Peters.  The patient lay in a semi-coma broken by passionate vomitings, and his condition puzzled us all.  I formally stated that he took atropine—­had been originally poisoned by atropine:  but we saw that his present symptoms were not atropine symptoms, but, it almost seemed, of some other vegetable poison, which we could not precisely name.

‘Mysterious thing,’ said Clark to me, when we were alone.

‘I don’t understand it,’ I said.

‘Who are the two nurses?’

‘Oh, highly recommended people of my own.’