f she had been a cat, went on speaking of the
explosive. It was _the_ explosive; their talk told her that before she
had finished the wiping.

"The formula I would give for it?" Van de Greutz was saying; as she
sopped up the last drops, he gave the formula.

She lifted the full bottle of Schiedam from the tray, and carried it
away with her--in the hand farthest from the chemist's, certainly, but
with as little concealment as ostentation. Near the door she glanced
at the German, or rather, at what he held, the sample of the
explosive. It was a white powder in a wide-necked, stoppered bottle of
the size Julia herself called "quarter pint." The bottle was not more
than two-thirds full, and had no mark on it at all, except a small
piece of paper stuck to the side, and inscribed with the single letter
"A." This may have been done in accordance with some private system of
Herr Van de Greutz's, or it may have been for the sake of secrecy. The
reason did not matter; the most accurate name would have been no more
informing to Julia, but decidedly more inconvenient.

She went out and shut the door quietly; then she literally fled back
to the kitchen with the Schiedam. Scarcely waiting to set it down, she
seized a slip of kitchen paper, and scribbled on it the string of
letters and figures that Herr Van de Greutz had given as the formula
of his explosive. She did not know what a formula was, nor in what
relation it stood to the chemical body, but from the talks she had
heard between the chemist and his friends, she guessed it to be
something important. Accordingly, when he said the formula, she was as
careful to remember it accurately as she was to remember the place of
the bottle on the shelf. Now she wrote it down just as he spoke it,
and, though perhaps not exactly as he would have written it, still
comprehensible. She pinned the piece of paper in the cuff of her
dress; it would not be found there if, by ill luck, she was caught and
searched later on. Next she went to the kitchen cupboard; there were
several wide-necked stoppered bottles there, doubtless without the
chemist's knowledge, but Marthe found them convenient for holding
spices, and ginger, and such things. She took the one nearest in shape
and size to the one which she had seen in the German's hand; emptied
out the contents, dusted it and put in ground rice till it was
two-thirds full. Then, with the lap-scissors, she trimmed a piece of
paper to the right size, wr