CHAPTER XIX
OLIVA IS WILLING
IT seemed that a grey curtain of mist hung before Oliva's eyes. It was a curtain spangled with tiny globes of dazzling light which grew from nothing and faded to nothing. Whenever she fixed her eyes upon one of these it straightway became two and three and then an unaccountable quantity.
She felt that she ought to see faces of people she knew, for one half of her brain had cleared and was calmly diagnosing her condition, but doing so as though she were somebody else. She was emerging from a drugged sleep; she could regard herself in a curious impersonal fashion which was most interesting. And people who are drugged see things and people. Strange mirages of the mind arise and stranger illusions are suffered. Yet she saw nothing save this silvery grey curtain with its drifting spots of light and heard nothing except a voice saying, "Come along, come along, wake up." A hundred, a thousand times this monotonous order was repeated, and then the grey curtain faded and she was lying on the bed, her head throbbing, her eyes hot and prickly, and two men were looking down at her, one of them a big barefaced man with a coarse mouth and sunken eyes.
"Was it my father really?" she asked drowsily.
"I was afraid of that second dose you gave her last night," said Milsom. "You are getting a condition of coma and that's the last thing you want."
"She'll be all right now," replied van Heerden, but his face was troubled. "The dose was severe—yet she seemed healthy enough to stand a three-minim injection."
Milsom shook his head.
"She'll be all right now, but she might as easily have died," he said. "I shouldn't repeat the dose."
"There's no need," said van Heerden.
"What time is it?" asked the girl, and sat up. She felt very weak and weary, but she experienced no giddiness.
