. When she woke on the morning of Saturday, the resolution was
gone. The Friday's thoughts--the Friday's events even--were blotted out
of her mind. Once again, creeping chill through the flow of her young
blood, she felt the slow and deadly prompting of despair which had come
to her in the waning moonlight, which had whispered to her in the awful
calm.

"I saw the end as the end must be," she said to herself, "on Thursday
night. I have been wrong ever since."

When she and her companion met that morning, she reiterated her
complaint of suffering from the toothache; she repeated her refusal
to allow Mrs. Wragge to procure a remedy; she left the house after
breakfast, in the direction of the chemist's shop, exactly as she had
left it on the morning before.

This time she entered the shop without an instant's hesitation.

"I have got an attack of toothache," she said, abruptly, to an elderly
man who stood behind the counter.

"May I look at the tooth, miss?"

"There is no necessity to look. It is a hollow tooth. I think I have
caught cold in it."

The chemist recommended various remedies which were in vogue fifteen
years since. She declined purchasing any of them.

"I have always found Laudanum relieve the pain better than anything
else," she said, trifling with the bottles on the counter, and looking
at them while she spoke, instead of looking at the chemist. "Let me have
some Laudanum."

"Certainly, miss. Excuse my asking the question--it is only a matter of
form. You are staying at Aldborough, I think?"

"Yes. I am Miss Bygrave, of North Shingles."

The chemist bowed; and, turning to his shelves, filled an ordinary
half-ounce bottle with laudanum immediately. In ascertaining his
customer's name and address beforehand, the owner of the shop had taken
a precaution which was natural to a careful man, but which was by no
means universal, under similar circumstances, in the state of the law at
that time.

"Shall I put you up a little cotton wool with the laudanum?" he asked,
after he had placed a label on the bottle, and had written a word on it
in large letters.

"If you please. What have you just written on the bottle?" She put the
question sharply, with something of distrust as well as curiosity in her
manner.

The chemist answered the question by turning the label toward her. She
saw written on it, in large letters--POISON.

"I like to be on the safe side, miss," said the old man, smiling. "Very
wort