now!"

Mrs. Winslow shuddered, drew her elegant wrappings about her fair
shoulders, as if the thought chilled her like the sudden opening of some
cold vault, and looked appealingly at the two men.

"Or might contain some deadly poison," said Fox, in a warning tone.

"And the fiend who threw it in here expected the bottle to break and the
poison to murder us!" said Mrs. Winslow indignantly.

"Things have come to a pretty pass when attempts like this are made on
people's lives!" said Bristol, adjusting his spectacles and edging
towards the mysterious missile.

"I shall move at once," stoutly affirmed Mrs. Winslow.

"Don't do any such thing," said Fox earnestly. "That will only show
whoever may be committing these indignities that we are alarmed by
them."

"We?--_we?_" repeated the adventuress, with a peculiar accent upon the
word "we." "It isn't you men that is meant. It's _me_. This is some of
that Lyon's doings. Oh, I could cut his heart out!"

The detectives saw that she was getting greatly excited, and Bristol,
with a view of quieting her as much as possible for the night, picked up
the vial by a string tied to it and hung it upon a nail, remarking that
he was something of a chemist himself and didn't believe it was
explosive, and also expressed a conviction that Mrs. Winslow should have
it analyzed.

To this she acceded, and expressed a determination to "get even" with
the author of these outrages, in which laudable resolve the detectives
promised to assist her; but the peach brandy seemed the only relief
possible to Mrs. Winslow for the remainder of the evening, which was
chiefly passed in wild speculations and theories concerning the new
"manifestations," which she began to fear might be the result of jealous
clairvoyants and vindictive spiritualists, who had endeavored to
blackmail both herself and Mr. Lyon, and, failing in this, were now
persecuting her.

The next day Mrs. Winslow went out quietly and secured the services of a
chemist under the Osborne House, who pronounced the contents nothing but
water, which proved a great relief to the agitated trio, but did not
remove from Mrs. Winslow's mind the anxiety and unrest that these
undesired and unlooked-for materializations were causing.

About noon, after Fox and Bristol had come in from a little stroll and
they were all laughing over the scare of the previous evening, a step
was heard on the stairs, and soon after a little man with a big box on
hi