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 CHAPTER VI

I said, I took two codein pills instead of one that night, and in an hour or so was conscious of the comfort and phantasmagoria of morphia. I was no longer in the bedroom of which I had tired, nor in the rough garden without trees or shade. I had escaped from these and in returning health was beside the sea, happily listening to the little waves breaking on the stones, no soul in sight but those two, Margaret Capel and Gabriel Stanton, in earnest talk that came to me as I sat with my back against a rock, the salt wind in my face. How it was they did not see me and moderate their voices I do not know, morphia gives one these little lapses and surprises.

Margaret looked extraordinarily sedate and yet perverse, her thin lips pink and eyes dancing. I saw the incandescent effect of which Peter Kennedy had told me. It was not only her eyes that were alight but the woman herself, the luminous fair skin and the fairness of her hair stirred and brightened by the sun and the sea-wind. She talked vividly, whilst he sat at her feet listening intently, offering her the homage of his softened angularities, his abandoned scholarship, his adoring eyes. 105