had seen before the deadly orosin had done its
work.

Then I told her my own story.

"I was inveigled by a specious story into that house soon after you
had sipped your coffee--perhaps even before," I said. "The library was
filled with a curious, overpowering perfume of _pot-pourri_ which
overcame me, and then De Gex gave me a liqueur glass of brandy into
which there had been introduced that most baneful of all drugs orosin!
It took immediate effect upon me, and a few moments later I was shown
you lying upon the bed, as though you were dead! Indeed, I believed
you to be dead, and in the muddled state of my brain I actually gave
a certificate with which that fiend De Gex had already provided
himself. I declared that you had died of heart disease, a malady for
which I had for some months treated you!"

"But I knew nothing more until I was found on the road in Hampshire,"
she said.

"And I knew nothing more until I found myself in a hospital over at
St. Malo," I went on. "The drug orosin in small doses destroys the
memory; in large doses it produces an effect of death, and in still
larger ones--like that administered to your friend the Anglo-Spanish
girl Miss Engledue--causes instant death, with no symptoms that the
post-mortem can distinguish other than the natural cause of sudden
heart failure."

"Was I given the drug deliberately?" asked Gabrielle, looking at me
with her wonderful wide-open eyes--eyes so different from those dulled
fixed ones which I had seen in the Duomo in old Florence, when she had
raised herself from praying in her half-demented state while the
sinister Italian doctor stood behind her.

"Yes," I said. "De Gex passed his coffee cup to you, smiling and
without compunction, well knowing the effect it must have upon you, at
the same time his intention being to kill your friend Miss Engledue by
administering a stronger dose. This must have been accomplished by the
infection of some wound or slight abrasion of the skin so that the
drug should be introduced directly into the system and not by the
mouth. Such a method would cause almost instant death."

"But did Gabrielle Engledue die?" she asked excitedly.

"Yes. She did. And by her death De Gex inherits the fortune of her
father, a rich Spaniard, the Conde de Chamartin."

She looked at me utterly bewildered, and well the poor girl might be.
She now realized that she had been the victim of an amazing plot
conceived by a master criminal, who wa