ller's room. She put it
back again, and heaved a deep breath of relief.

But it was a bad sign (she thought) that her sense of caution had been
completely suspended, in the eagerness of her curiosity to know if Mr.
Keller's message of invitation referred to the wedding day. "I lose my
best treasure," she said to herself sadly, "if I am beginning to lose my
steadiness of mind. If this should happen again----"

She left the expression of the idea uncompleted; locked the door of the
room; and returned to the place on which she had left the box.

Seating herself, she rested the box on her knee and opened it.

Certain tell-tale indentations, visible where the cover fitted into the
lock, showed that it had once been forced open. The lock had been
hampered on some former occasion; and the key remained so fast fixed in
it that it could neither be turned nor drawn out. In her newly-aroused
distrust of her own prudence, she was now considering the serious
question of emptying the box, and sending it to be fitted with a lock and
key.

"Have I anything by me," she thought to herself, "in which I can keep the
bottles?"

She emptied the box, and placed round her on the floor those terrible six
bottles which had been the special subjects of her husband's
precautionary instructions on his death-bed. Some of them were smaller
than others, and were manufactured in glass of different colors--the six
compartments in the medicine-chest being carefully graduated in size, so
as to hold them all steadily. The labels on three of the bottles were
unintelligible to Madame Fontaine; the inscriptions were written in
barbarously abridged Latin characters.

The bottle which was the fourth in order, as she took them out one by
one, was wrapped in a sheet of thick cartridge-paper, covered on its
inner side with characters written in mysterious cipher. But the label
pasted on the bottle contained an inscription in good readable German,
thus translated:

"The Looking-Glass Drops. Fatal dose, as discovered by experiment on
animals, the same as in the case of 'Alexander's Wine.' But the effect,
in producing death, more rapid, and more indistinguishable, in respect of
presenting traces on post-mortem examination."

The lines thus written were partially erased by strokes of the pen--drawn
through them at a later date, judging by the color of the ink. In the
last blank space left at the foot of the label, these words were
added--also in ink of a fr