hought; "and
yet----and yet----"

"Well, was there anybody outside?" Jack asked.

"Nothing to matter," she said. The answer was spoken mechanically.
Something in him or something in herself, it was impossible to say which,
had suddenly set her thinking of the day when her husband had dragged him
out of the jaws of death. It seemed strange that the memory of the dead
Doctor should come between them in that way, and at that time.

Jack recalled her to the passing moment. He offered her the
medicine-measuring-glass left on the table. "It frightens me, when I
think of what I did," he said. "And yet it's such a pretty color--I want
to see it again."

In silence, she took the glass; in silence, she measured out the fatal
two drachms of the poison, and showed it to him.

"Do put it in something," he pleaded, "and let me have it to keep: I know
I shall want it."

Still in silence, she turned to the table, and searching again in her
dressing-case, found a little empty bottle. She filled it and carefully
fitted in the glass stopper. Jack held out his hand. She suddenly drew
her own hand back. "No," she said. "On second thoughts, I won't let you
have it."

"Why not?"

"Because you can't govern your tongue, and can't keep anything to
yourself. You will tell everybody in the house that I have given you my
wonderful medicine. They will all be wanting some--and I shall have none
left for myself."

"Isn't that rather selfish?" said Jack. "I suppose it's natural, though.
Never mind, I'll do anything to please you; I'll keep it in my pocket and
not say a word to anybody. Now?"

Once more, he held out his hand. Once more Madame Fontaine checked
herself in the act of yielding to him. Her dead husband had got between
them again. The wild words he had spoken to her, in the first horror of
the discovery that his poor imbecile servant had found and tasted the
fatal drug, came back to her memory--"If he dies I shall not survive him.
And I firmly believe I shall not rest in my grave." She had never been,
like her husband, a believer in ghosts: superstitions of all sorts were
to her mind unworthy of a reasonable being. And yet at that moment, she
was so completely unnerved that she looked round the old Gothic room,
with a nameless fear throbbing at her heart.

It was enough--though nothing appeared: it was enough--though
superstitions of all sorts were unworthy of a reasonable being--to shake
her fell purpose, for the time. Nothing