mess to rights. I'll send the
man here to mop it all up. Our Stout Friend is harmless enough now, my
dear lady--in combination with a boarded floor and a coming mop! I'm
so sorry; I really am so sorry to have disappointed you." With those
soothing words, he offered his arm, and led Miss Gwilt out of the
Dispensary.

"Have you done with me for the present?" she asked, when they were in
the hall.

"Oh, dear, dear, what a way of putting it!" exclaimed the doctor.
"Dinner at six," he added, with his politest emphasis, as she turned
from him in disdainful silence, and slowly mounted the stairs to her own
room.

A clock of the noiseless sort--incapable of offending irritable
nerves--was fixed in the wall, above the first-floor landing, at the
Sanitarium. At the moment when the hands pointed to a quarter before
six, the silence of the lonely upper regions was softly broken by the
rustling of Miss Gwilt's dress. She advanced along the corridor of the
first floor--paused at the covered apparatus fixed outside the room
numbered Four--listened for a moment--and then unlocked the cover with
the duplicate key.

The open lid cast a shadow over the inside of the casing. All she saw
at first was what she had seen already--the jar, and the pipe and glass
funnel inserted in the cork. She removed the funnel; and, looking about
her, observed on the window-sill close by a wax-tipped wand used for
lighting the gas. She took the wand, and, introducing it through the
aperture occupied by the funnel, moved it to and fro in the jar. The
faint splash of some liquid, and the grating noise of certain hard
substances which she was stirring about, were the two sounds that caught
her ear. She drew out the wand, and cautiously touched the wet left on
it with the tip of her tongue. Caution was quite needless in this case.
The liquid was--water.

In putting the funnel back in its place, she noticed something faintly
shining in the obscurely lit vacant space at the side of the jar. She
drew it out, and produced a Purple Flask. The liquid with which it was
filled showed dark through the transparent coloring of the glass; and
fastened at regular intervals down one side of the Flask were six thin
strips of paper, which divided the contents into six equal parts.

There was no doubt now that the apparatus had been secretly prepared for
her--the apparatus of which she alone (besides the doctor) possessed the
key.

She put back the Flask, and locked