He finished dressing without any severe return of pain, but just as he was ready to go downstairs it came suddenly back again in such stabs and spasms of anguish that for a moment he held on to his dressing-table with clenched hands, bitten lips, and a dripping forehead. Then his eye fell on the bottle of laudanum which stood by his looking-glass, and though never before had he taken two doses on the same day, yet never before after one dose had he suffered pain so agonising and excruciating as this. But to-day the impulse was incontrollable: he could no longer reason about the expediency of it, and next moment, with shaking hand, he poured a full dose into the graduated glass, and drank it. Those few moments had made him feel faint and sick with pain, and after drinking he sat down to wait for the divine relief that would come so quickly. On his very sensitive and excitable nerves the drug exercised an almost instantaneous effect--not soporific at all, but tranquillising and at the same time immensely stimulating. The pain would fade like the melting away of the vapour of breath on a frosty morning, till it became an incredible memory, while even as it faded a warm tingling glow began to invade him. It was as if after some frost-bitten Arctic night the sun of the South would pour its beams upon his brain; happiness and content would unfold, and, like some magic rose miraculously opening its rosy petals in the luminous peace of a summer morning, a sense of unspeakable well-being would sprawl and blossom over his consciousness. He had not to wait long: before the seconds on the watch which he had just taken up when the agony seized him had ticked themselves into a minute, the divine remission of pain began, and, increasing as it increased, there came that extraordinary glow of content, so that a couple of minutes afterwards it was not so much in the utter relief of pain that his body revelled as in the ecstasy of this supreme, harmonious sense of health. And then, as always, this spread like some tide of warm incoming waters to his mind. The horror and suffering he had seen that day in the fevered village ceased to weigh upon him and darken him with the sense of his possible responsibility and certain helplessness. Instinctively, his mind ceased to dwell on the thought of the stalker whose life was nearly despaired of, but went to another bedside where a life that had been almost despaired of yesterday had seemed to pause at the very entrance of the valley of the shadow, and had crawled back a little way into life again. The shadow from the valley still lay over it, but its face was set towards the living. Already this divine drug had done that for him: it stopped pain of the mind, it seemed, even as it stopped the torture of an anguished nerve.