st marvelous of complexions, but which sooner or later caused death.

Gretchen should take it; it could be placed in the basin of water in
which she was wont to bathe her face each morning, and it would enter
the body through the pores of the skin. In this way the doctors would be
completely baffled, for they would not be able to trace the poison.

She put this dastardly plot into execution, and her cruel heart did not
upbraid her, though she saw the girl droop and fade daily before her
eyes.

When she looked out of her window and saw Gretchen and her lover pacing
up and down the primrose path in the moonlight, a horrible laugh would
break from the great lady's ripe, red lips.

"There will be but a few more of these meetings, tender partings and
kisses under the larch-tree boughs."

She had never dreamed, this false, cruel beauty, that a man's heart
could be constant to a dead love and spurn a living one.

All these years she had lived to rue it; but neither prayers, nor
suffering, nor pangs of conscience could atone for the terrible crime
committed.

During all the years that had passed since Gretchen had been lying in
that lonely grave, she had never known one moment's peace of mind, until
this hour when she lay dying and had confessed all.

Slowly, twice, thrice, Nadine Holt read the story through, and as she
read, a terrible thought came into her own mind.

Why could not she procure this same drug and administer it in the same
way to Jessie Staples?

She took the paper up to her room and hid it very carefully in her
satchel.

True, Jessie had taken her in this time without saying one word of the
past unpleasantness, treating her as though that quarrel had never been.

But Nadine was different. She was one of the kind that "never forgets,
never forgives" while life lasts.

When the household was wrapped in deep sleep that night, Nadine stole
out upon her terrible mission.

Several careful druggists refused to fill her order; but this did not
daunt her. She knew that among the lot she would soon come across a
catch-penny, and in this supposition she was quite right.

She soon found a place, and secured the deadly drug which she called
for, and she stole into the house again without any one being the wiser
for her midnight trip.

The light was burning low in the sick-room as she entered it, and Mrs.
Brown sat half dozing in her chair by the bedside.

She started up as Nadine crossed the threshold.