14/23 Go on.' 'Can I anyhow have hurt your feelings, Jack ?' 'How can you have hurt my feelings ?' 'Good Heaven, Jack, you look frightfully ill! There's a strange film come over your eyes.' Mr.Jasper, with a forced smile, stretches out his right hand, as if at once to disarm apprehension and gain time to get better. After a while he says faintly: 'I have been taking opium for a pain--an agony--that sometimes overcomes me. The effects of the medicine steal over me like a blight or a cloud, and pass. You see them in the act of passing; they will be gone directly. |