With the speed of a professional conjurer he whipped a small packet from his pocket and, extracting a tablet, dropped it into Irma's glass. He decanted a little wine into the glass and handed it to her with the exaggerated graciousness which seldom left him. 'And I will take some myself,' he said, 'and we will drink to each other.'

       Irma had collapsed into a chair, and her long marmoreal face was buried in her hands. Her black glasses, which she wore to protect her eyes from the light, were at a rakish slant across her cheek.

       'Come, come, I am forgetting my promise!' cried the doctor, standing before her, very tall, slender and upright, with that celluloid head of his, all sentience and nervous intelligence, tilted to one side like a bird's.

       'First a quaff of this delicious wine from a vineyard beneath a brooding hill - I can see it so dearly - and you, O Irma, can 'you' see it, too? The peasants toiling and sweating in the sun - and why? Because they have no option, Irma. They are desperately poor, and their bowed necks are wry. And the husband-men, like every good husband, tending his love - stroking the vines with his horny hand, whispering to them, coaxing them, "O little grapes," he whispers, "give up your wine. Irma is waiting." And here it is; here it is, ha, ha, ha, ha! Delicious and cold and white, in a cut-glass goblet. Toss back your coif and quaff, my querulous queen!

       Irma roused herself a little. She had not heard a word. She had been in her own private hell of humiliation. Her eyes turned to the knife in the ceiling. The thin line of her mouth twitched, but she took the glass from her brother's outstretched hand.

       Her brother clinked his glass against hers and, duplicating the movement of his arm, she raised her own automatically and drank.

       'And now for the little jingle which I threw off in that nonchalant way of mine. How did it go? How did it go?'