She took the liquid down and squeezed her eyes shut with the aftertaste. It had happened that way for seven days. The first day she had spit all of it up. The second day she had spit it up and Nash had gotten out of his chair, plucked the bottle of antidote from the doctor’s hand and smashed it in the fireplace. That afternoon, after Matthew had reported the incident, Professor Fell had called Nash to his house. The third day, with a newly-concocted bottle at hand, the cup of liquid—or most of it, at least—had gone down the insensate girl’s throat by the aid of a funnel, while Nash had retreated to the back to console his sobbing wife.

As Matthew and Firebaugh had walked back to the hospital on that third day, after what seemed at best a partial success, Matthew had asked the doctor if it wasn’t best to move Berry out of the Nashes’ house and perhaps give her a bed in the hospital, as she was still so susceptible to their wiles, but Firebaugh had answered that from his experiences at the Highcliff asylum—and mark it, this was not far different from tending to a moonstruck lunatic—Berry believed herself to be the daughter and it would be more traumatic for her to be removed. So one had to trust in the power of Professor Fell over the Nashes, and there was no recourse for that.

Matthew had harbored the fear that in their delirium of what was right and what was wrong the Nashes might take up a pistol one night and kill Berry rather than see her taken away by another hand, after which they might dispatch themselves in a similar fashion, but what was there to do but to accompany the doctor at nine o’clock every morning, stop at the mayor’s house at three in the afternoon, at six and at eight like clockwork as he had done since the ministrations had begun. He could move into the house, he supposed, and sleep on the floor in the front room, and he had begun to consider that as a real possibility though he considered the idea that Pamela Nash might brain him with a poker past midnight.

During the past few days he had seen Julian walking about, and had spoken briefly to him but it seemed their association was done. Julian had taken on the aura of the bad man on Fell’s payroll again, and in their quick encounters Matthew caught from him the feeling that he didn’t wish to be bothered any further with Matthew’s situation, Berry, the sorcerer’s mirror, or anything that was not about his principal interest of Julian Devane.

“If … I mean to say … when Berry recovers,” Matthew had said to the doctor, “how might it happen? Will it be a gradual thing, or sudden?”