on the hard tasks of the intellect.

Lucretia mused over Gabriel's words and warning: "To be safe, you must
know all his secrets, or none." What was the secret which Dalibard had
not communicated to her?

She rose, stole up the cold, cheerless stairs, and ascended to the attic
which Dalibard had lately hired. It was locked; and she observed that
the lock was small,--so small that the key might be worn in a ring. She
descended, and entered her husband's usual cabinet, which adjoined the
sitting-room. All the books which the house contained were there,--a few
works on metaphysics, Spinoza in especial, the great Italian histories,
some volumes of statistics, many on physical and mechanical
philosophy, and one or two works of biography and memoirs. No light
literature,--that grace and flower of human culture, that best
philosophy of all, humanizing us with gentle art, making us wise through
the humours, elevated through the passions, tender in the affections of
our kind. She took out one of the volumes that seemed less arid than the
rest, for she was weary of her own thoughts, and began to read. To
her surprise, the first passage she opened was singularly interesting,
though the title was nothing more seductive than the "Life of a
Physician of Padua in the Sixteenth Century." It related to that
singular epoch of terror in Italy when some mysterious disease,
varying in a thousand symptoms, baffled all remedy, and long defied all
conjecture,--a disease attacking chiefly the heads of families, father
and husband; rarely women. In one city, seven hundred husbands perished,
but not one wife! The disease was poison. The hero of the memoir was one
of the earlier discoverers of the true cause of this household epidemic.
He had been a chief authority in a commission of inquiry. Startling
were the details given in the work,--the anecdotes, the histories, the
astonishing craft brought daily to bear on the victim, the wondrous
perfidy of the subtle means, the variation of the certain murder,--here
swift as epilepsy, there slow and wasting as long decline. The lecture
was absorbing; and absorbed in the book Lucretia still was, when she
heard Dalibard's voice behind: he was looking over her shoulder.

"A strange selection for so fair a student! En fant, play not with such
weapons."

"But is this all true?"

"True, though scarce a fragment of the truth. The physician was a sorry
chemist and a worse philosopher. He blundered in his a