He put it by lightly, saying that it was only a result of my long and most severe illness and that I should steady down in time, especially if we could escape from that island and its unnatural atmosphere.

Yet as he spoke he glanced at me shrewdly with his quick eyes, and when he turned to go away I heard him mutter something to himself about "unholy influences" and "that confounded old Oro." The words were spoken to himself and quite beneath his breath, and of course not meant to reach me.

But one of the curious concomitants of my state was that all my senses, and especially my hearing, had become most abnormally acute.

A whisper far away was now to me like a loud remark made in a room.
Bickley's reflection, for I can scarcely call it more, set me thinking.
Yva had said that Oro sent me medicine which was administered to me without Bickley's knowledge, and as she believed, saved my life, or certainly my reason.

What was in it?
I wondered.