"And you can heal people who don't believe?" he asked. "Why not? But a man who didn't believe couldn't heal. And by the time the cure is complete, as far as I know, the patient nearly always believes." Thurso was asking questions now in a different spirit to that which had prompted them before. He knew the difference himself. "You spoke of laudanum as poisonous stuff just now," he said. "But if God made everything, including poppies, how can it be poisonous?" Cochrane laughed. "Well, we had better ask Lady Maud to come back," he said. "It was about that very point that I was going to talk to her to-day. Now, if you care to listen to that, since you have asked the question, pray do. But if it bores you, why, if you'll read the paper or occupy yourself for half an hour, we can then all start out skating, or what you please." "But aren't you going to treat me?" asked Thurso. "Oh, I was at it this morning for some time," he said. "I've paid you the morning visit, so to speak." Then again some spirit of antagonism entered into Thurso, and when Maud came back he crossed over to the fire with the paper. But the news was of no importance or interest, since it chiefly concerned American affairs, which meant nothing to him, and by degrees he found himself attending less to the printed page and more to the voice that sounded so cheerful and serene. Sometimes he found himself mentally ridiculing what was said, but yet he listened. It was arresting, somehow, and whether it was only the personality of the speaker that arrested him, or what he said, he found himself, whether approving or disapproving, more and more absorbed in it. Cochrane spoke first, as he said he was going to do, about the apparently poisonous or sanative effects of drugs. These effects, he maintained, were not inherent in the drugs themselves, but in the belief of those who used them. It was quite certain, for instance, from the purely medical point of view, that an injection of plain water could be made, and that the patient, believing it to be morphia, would sleep under the influence of what had no influence at all. He slept because he believed he had been given something which would make him sleep. But, from the Christian Science point of view, to use drugs for curative purposes was merely to encourage the false belief that they could in themselves cure, while, on the other hand, anyone who knew and fully believed that they could neither be health-giving nor destructive of health might, if he chose, eat deadly poison, and be none the worse for it. But no one who held this belief would do so merely as a demonstration to satisfy the idle curiosity of those who did not believe. Up till now he had been speaking quietly, as if all that was mere commonplace and superficial. But now intenser conviction vibrated in his voice.