that without consulting me! Do that once more, and I swear I have
nothing further to do with you!'

'Rubbish,' said Peters: 'why all this unnecessary heat? It was a mere
flea-bite. I felt that I needed it.'

'He injected it with his own hand...' remarked Clodagh.

She was now standing at the mantel-piece, having lifted the syringe-box
from the night-table, taken from its velvet lining both the syringe and
the vial containing the morphia tablets, and gone to the mantel-piece to
melt one of the tablets in a little of the distilled water there. Her
back was turned upon us, and she was a long time. I was standing; Peters
in his arm-chair, smoking. Clodagh then began to talk about a Charity
Bazaar which she had visited that afternoon.

She was long, she was long. The crazy thought passed through some dim
region of my soul: 'Why is she so _long_?'

'Ah, that was a pain!' went Peters: 'never mind the bazaar, aunt--think
of the morphia.'

Suddenly an irresistible impulse seized me--to rush upon her, to dash
syringe, tabloids, glass, and all, from her hands. I _must_ have obeyed
it--I was on the tip-top point of obeying--my body already leant prone:
but at that instant a voice at the opened door behind me said:

'Well, how is everything?'

It was Wilson, the electrician, who stood there. With lightning