will leave the thing
undone which he has come here to do; he will leave the words unspoken
which he has come here to say--when he knows that the act may make me
a public scandal, and that the words may send me to the scaffold!" Her
color rose, and she smiled with a terrible irony as she looked for the
first time at the door of the Room. "I shall be your widow," she said,
"in half an hour!"

She opened the case of the apparatus and took the Purple Flask in her
hand. After marking the time by a glance at the clock, she dropped
into the glass funnel the first of the six separate Pourings that were
measured for her by the paper slips.

When she had put the Flask back, she listened at the mouth of the
funnel. Not a sound reached her ear: the deadly process did its work in
the silence of death itself. When she rose and looked up the moon was
shining in at the window, and the moaning wind was quiet.

Oh, the time! the time! If it could only have been begun and ended with
the first Pouring!

She went downstairs into the hall; she walked to and fro, and listened
at the open door that led to the kitchen stairs. She came up again; she
went down again. The first of the intervals of five minutes was endless.
The time stood still. The suspense was maddening.

The interval passed. As she took the Flask for the second time, and
dropped in the second Pouring, the clouds floated over the moon, and the
night view through the window slowly darkened.

The restlessness that had driven her up and down the stairs, and
backward and forward in the hall, left her as suddenly as it had come.
She waited through the second interval, leaning on the window-sill, and
staring, without conscious thought of any kind, into the black night.
The howling of a belated dog was borne toward her on the wind, at
intervals, from some distant part of the suburb. She found herself
following the faint sound as it died away into silence with a dull
attention, and listening for its coming again with an expectation
that was duller still. Her arms lay like lead on the window-sill; her
forehead rested against the glass without feeling the cold. It was not
till the moon struggled out again that she was startled into sudden
self-remembrance. She turned quickly, and looked at the clock; seven
minutes had passed since the second Pouring.

As she snatched up the Flask, and fed the funnel for the third time,
the full consciousness of her position came back to her. The fe