it round the keys themselves. Then
she got some stiff writing-paper, and a heavy ivory paper-knife, and
from the locked drawers she took that other package which was done up
in coarse paper.

From this she took some of the rough, half-pulverized white stuff, laid
it upon the marble top of the chest of drawers, and with the ivory
paper-knife, pressing heavily, she little by little crushed it as fine
as dust.

She then took nine of the eighteen little papers containing the arsenic,
which were left, opened each one at the end and poured out the contents
apart, into a little heap quite separate from the other. And of the
other, she took a pinch for each little paper and dropped it in--about
as much in quantity as she had taken out. Then she closed each of the
papers, carefully slipping one folded end into the other as chemists do;
when they were all closed, she made a tiny hole in each with the point
of a needle, so that she should know the bad from the good, if
necessary. This was only a precaution, and could do no harm. Then she
arranged the good and the bad in their little packages of five, each in
a tiny india-rubber band, laying bad ones and good ones alternately.
When this was done, she put all the packages into the original paper,
loosely opened, and laid them once more before her looking-glass, upon
the toilet table. Her large white hands were exceedingly skilful, and it
would have needed sharp eyes to see that the papers of medicine had been
tampered with.

After this, she cut a sheet of the writing-paper into four square
pieces, and very neatly made out of three of them three very small open
boxes, for moulds, each of the size of a large lump of sugar, and she
set them up side by side in a row. One was larger than the other two.

They had brought her powdered sugar, with the juice of a lemon in a
glass and a decanter of water; she had said that if she were thirsty she
would make herself a glass of lemonade in the night. She had also a
bottle of ordinary sticking gum.

She took the sugar and mixed a very little with some of the stuff she
had pulverized, and with a few drops of the gum, till it was a stiff,
hard paste, and with the end of the paper-knife she carefully filled the
largest of her three moulds with it. She was sure that it would be dry
and hard by the next day, and it would have the size, the appearance,
and somewhat the taste of a lump of sugar.

Then she halved the little heap of arsenic medici