"I think it is so good of you to bring the cases up here," he said. "Lady Maud told me yesterday that you were doing so. I am sure it must help towards recovery to remove people from surroundings which they associate with illness to fresh, bright places."
"One sees that every day," he said. "If you associate a place with pleasure, you are pleased to go there again. The mind, left to itself, clings so strongly to material things. If one has been happy in a certain room, one thinks that those surroundings will tend to produce happiness again. It is one of the illusions we get rid of last."
"You mean," he said, and then stopped, for an access of pain so sharp seized him that he could not get on.
Maud saw, and gave him a sudden quick look of sympathy, which annoyed him, and, for the first time, Cochrane saw too. But after a moment he recovered himself, and went on.
"You mean I shall always associate this house with typhoid and sick, suffering people?" he asked. "That is not very cheering."
Bertie Cochrane smiled, looking with those happy, childlike eyes first at Maud, then at his host.
"No, I mean just the opposite," he said. "You will always associate this house with recovery, with the sweeping away of illness and pain."
Dinner was at an end, and the pause of cigarette-lighting followed. Bertie Cochrane had taken one as he spoke, but he did not light it, and laid it down again on the cloth. Then he got up.
"Lord Thurso, you are wonderfully brave," he said. "I am sure you feel in horrible pain. Let me go right away now. I have enjoyed coming up to dine with Lady Maud and you ever so much."
For the last minute or two the pain had become so much more acute that Thurso's forehead dripped with perspiration. All dinner, too, the longing, the drunkard's desire, to get to his room and take a dose from that healing bottle had been growing like some nightmare figure. And now, when his pain, in spite of all his gallant efforts to conceal it, was discovered, the desire became overwhelming--he could no longer master it.
"Pray don't think of going away," he said, "but if you will excuse me for a few minutes, I think I will go upstairs. I have some medicine there that never fails to set me right, and I shall be down again quite shortly. Yes, I may as well confess it, the pain has been pretty bad."