ding discovery had never left her, since Jack had
owned the use to which he had put the contents of the blue-glass bottle.

Animated by that all-mastering dread, she had thrown away every poison in
the medicine-chest--had broken the bottles into fragments--and had taken
those fragments out with her, when she left the house to follow Doctor
Dormann. On the way to the cemetery, she had scattered the morsels of
broken glass and torn paper on the dark road outside the city gate.
Nothing now remained but the empty medicine-chest, and the writing in
cipher, once rolled round the poison called the "Looking-Glass Drops."

Under these altered circumstances, she had risked asking Doctor Dormann
to interpret the mysterious characters, on the bare chance of their
containing some warning by which she might profit, in her present
ignorance of the results which Jack's ignorant interference might
produce.

Acting under the same vague terror of that possible revival, to which
Jack looked forward with such certain hope, she had followed him to the
Deadhouse, and had waited, hidden in the cells, to hear what dangerous
confidences he might repose in the doctor or in Mr. Keller, and to combat
on the spot the suspicion which he might ignorantly rouse in their minds.
Still in the same agony of doubt, she now stood, with her eyes on the
cell, trying to summon the resolution to judge for herself. One look at
the dead woman, while the solitude in the room gave her the chance--one
look might assure her of the livid pallor of death, or warn her of the
terrible possibilities of awakening life. She hurried headlong over the
intervening space, and looked in.

There, grand and still, lay her murderous work! There, ghostly white on
the ground of the black robe, were the rigid hands, topped by the hideous
machinery which was to betray them, if they trembled under the mysterious
return of life!

In the instant when she saw it, the sight overwhelmed her with horror.
She turned distractedly, and fled through the open door. She crossed the
courtyard, like a deeper shadow creeping swiftly through the darkness of
the winter night. On the threshold of the solitary waiting-room,
exhausted nature claimed its rest. She wavered--groped with her hands at
the empty air--and sank insensible on the floor.

In the meantime, Schwartz revealed the purpose of his visit to the
bath-room.

The glass doors which protected the upper division of the cabinet were
lo