ghting a cigarette.

"Not likely, not likely," he went on. "No notion of anything of the
sort being possible ever entered into my head. . . . And besides
. . . he was not so much to blame as it seems. . . . He was unfaithful
to her in rather a queer way, with no desire to be; he came home
at night somewhat elevated, wanted to make love to somebody, his
wife was in an interesting condition . . . then he came across a
lady who had come to stay for three days--damnation take her--
an empty-headed creature, silly and not good-looking. It couldn't
be reckoned as an infidelity. His wife looked at it in that way
herself and soon . . . forgave it. Nothing more was said about
it. . . ."

"People don't die without a reason," said the doctor.

"That is so, of course, but all the same . . . I cannot admit that
she poisoned herself. But it is strange that the idea has never
struck me before! And no one thought of it! Everyone was astonished
that her prediction had come to pass, and the idea . . . of such a
death was far from their mind. And indeed, it cannot be that she
poisoned herself! No!"

The examining magistrate pondered. The thought of the woman who had
died so strangely haunted him all through the inquest. As he noted
down what the doctor dictated to him he moved his eyebrows gloomily
and rubbed his forehead.

"And are there really poisons that kill one in a quarter of an hour,
gradually, without any pain?" he asked the doctor while the latter
was opening the skull.

"Yes, there are. Morphia for instance."

"H'm, strange. I remember she used to keep something of the sort
. . . . But it could hardly be."

On the way back the examining magistrate looked exhausted, he kept
nervously biting his moustache, and was unwilling to talk.

"Let us go a little way on foot," he said to the doctor. "I am tired
of sitting."

After walking about a hundred paces, the examining magistrate seemed
to the doctor to be overcome with fatigue, as though he had been
climbing up a high mountain. He stopped and, looking at the doctor
with a strange look in his eyes, as though he were drunk, said:

"My God, if your theory is correct, why it's. . . it was cruel,
inhuman! She poisoned herself to punish some one else! Why, was the
sin so great? Oh, my God! And why did you make me a present of this
damnable idea, doctor!"

The examining magistrate clutched at his head in despair, and went
on:

"What I have told you was about my own wife,