and soft,
though November, and we leaned against a grey gate and talked it all
over.

Then says Master John, 'Look here, Polly, we aren't to have any
secrets from you. There's no doubt they were married, but doesn't it
seem to you rather strange that my poor old father should have been
taken off so suddenly after the wedding?'

'Yes,' I said, 'but the doctors seemed to understand all about it.'

Then he said something about the doctors that it was just as well
they weren't there to hear, and he went on--

'Of course I thought at first they weren't married, so I set about
finding out what they did when they came to London; and I haven't
found out what my father did, but I did pounce on a bit of news, and
that's that she wasn't with him the whole day. They came to Charing
Cross by the same train, but he wasn't with her when she went to get
that arsenic from the chemist's.'

'What!' says I, 'arsenic?'

'Yes,' says John, 'don't you get excited, my dear. I found that out
by a piece of luck once as doesn't come to a man every day of the
week. A woman answering to her description went into a chemist's
shop, and the assistant gave the arsenic, a shilling's-worth it was,
to kill rats with.'

'And God above only knows why they put such bits of fools into a
shop to sell sixpenny-worths of death over the counter,' says Harry.

'Now the question is: Was this woman answering to her description
really Mrs. Blake or not?'

'It was Mrs. Blake,' says I, very short and sharp.

'How do you know?' says John, shorter and sharper.

Then I put my hand in my pocket and pulled out what I had found in
Mrs. Blake's corner cupboard, and John took it in his hand and
looked at it, and whistled long and low. It was a little white
packet, and had been opened and the label torn across, but you could
read what was on it plain enough--'Arsenic--Poison,' and the name of
the chemist in London.

John's face was red as fire, like some men's is when they're going
in fighting, and my Harry's as white as milk, as some other men's is
at such times. But as for me, I fell a-crying to think that any
woman could be so wicked, and him such a good master and so kind to
her, and she having the sole care of him, helpless in her hands as
the new-born babe.

And Harry, he patted me on the back, and told me to cheer up and not
to cry, and to be a good girl; and presently, my handkerchief being
wet through, I stopped, and then John, he said--

'We'll bri