“None but patience.” “But, surely, they may be alleviated?” “I have tried remedies without end, but to no purpose.” “Will you let me make you up a mixture from a prescription of my own? I have all the materials at hand. If I make it up, will you promise to take it? I don’t say that it will cure your headache, but I do believe that it will give you relief.” There was a strangely anxious, almost haggard look on his face as he spoke thus, and yet his eyes were never once bent on Lionel. He had picked up one of the cues, and seemed to be busily examining it. When he had done speaking, he waited for his cousin’s answer with parted lips, in a sort of breathless hush. Lionel laughed a rather dismal laugh. “Well, if you have any faith in your mixture, I don’t mind trying it,” he said. “It can’t make the pain worse, and there is just a faint chance that it may ease it a bit—or that I may fancy that it does, which is pretty much the same thing.” The cue dropped from Kester’s fingers and rattled on the floor. “What was that?” he said, suddenly, looking round with a shiver. “I could have sworn that somebody touched me on the shoulder.” “There is no one here but ourselves,” said Lionel, languidly. The pain was almost more than he could bear up against. Kester recovered his equanimity after an impatient “Pish” at his folly, and the two men went slowly out of the billiard-room together. Outside the door Kester whispered in his cousin’s ear, “I will go and fetch the mixture, and be back again in two minutes.” Lionel nodded, and Kester was gone. “Why need he have whispered to me?” asked Lionel of himself. “There was no one to overhear him. There’s something queer about him to-night. A little touch of the blues, perhaps; and yet he never seems to drink very hard.” Lionel went off to his rooms—a bedroom and sitting-room en suite, next to the rooms occupied by Osmond. He took off his coat and tie, and unbuttoned his waistcoat, and then sat down with his feet on the fender, waiting for Kester. Lionel Dering had been troubled with occasional headaches of a very distressing kind ever since he could remember any thing, and he had quite made up his mind that he must be so troubled till the end of the chapter. He had no faith in his cousin’s proposed remedy, but he would take it simply to oblige Kester. Kester was not long away. He entered the room presently, carrying a small silver tankard in his hand. “I can’t tell you how sorry I feel for this night’s work,” said Lionel. “What have you done that you should feel sorry for?” asked Kester, as he put down the tankard on the table. “I ought to have left the billiard-room instead of flying at poor little Osmond in the brutal way I did. He was half drunk to-night, and didn’t know what he was about. He would have apologised in the morning, and then everything would have come right.”