Page:Pain--Stories in the dark.djvu/41

THIS IS ALL to keep awvake that he lit his candle and went upstairs. Every night, or early morning, as his candle lit the long mirror on the landing, he saw himself reflected, and the reflection always came as a surprise. He never looked as he supposed that he looked; sometimes the reflection seemed almost unrecognisable.

'I can't sleep before three in the morning,' Wyatt had maintained to the doctor.

'Then it must be morphia,' said Holling.

He called that night with a hypodermic syringe, and that night Wyatt went up to bed at ten o'clock and slept at once.

'But I mustn't go on with morphia, of course,' said Wyatt knowingly.

'It won't be necessary,' said Holling. 'You see, after I've given it you for three nights, I shall have broken through your habit. Then you at once return to the normal 37