ference with them to have escaped me. What could that sound
have been--some accidental shiver of the glass, stirred by a breath
of wind, one of those mysterious movements of inanimate objects
which are so apt to occur in the dead hours of the night, and which
seem always more or less ghostly to a nervous watcher? Could it have
been only accidental? or had Mrs. Darrell been prowling stealthily
in and out of that room again?

Why should she have been there? What could her secret coming and
going mean? What purpose could she have in hovering about the sick
girl? what could her hatred profit itself by such uneasy
watchfulness, unless-- Unless what? An icy coldness came over me, and
I shook like a leaf, as a dreadful thought took shape in my mind.
What if that desperate woman's hatred took the most awful form? what
if her secret presence in that room meant murder?

I took up the medicine-bottle and examined it minutely. In colour,
in odour, in taste, the medicine seemed to me exactly what it had
been from the time it had been altered, in accordance with the
Manchester doctor's second prescription. Mr. Hale's label was on the
bottle, and the quantity of the contents was exactly what it had
been after I gave Milly her last dose--one dose gone out of the full
bottle.

'O, no, no, no,' I thought to myself; 'I must be mad to imagine
anything so awful. A woman may be weak, and wicked, and jealous,
when she has loved as intensely as this woman seems to have loved
Angus Egerton; but that is no reason she should become a murderess.'

I stood with the medicine-bottle in my hand sorely perplexed. What
could I do? Should I suspend the medicine for to-night, at the risk
of retarding the cure? or should I give it in spite of that half
suspicion that it had been tampered with?

What ground had I for such a suspicion? At that moment nothing but
the sound that had awakened me, the chinking sound of one glass
knocked against another.

Had I really heard any such sound, or had it only been a delusion of
my half sleeping brain? While I stood weighing this question, a
sudden recollection flashed across my mind, and I had no longer
ground for doubt.

The cork of the medicine-bottle, when I gave Milly her last dose,
had been too large for the bottle; so much so, that I had found it
difficult to put it in again after giving the medicine. The cork of
the bottle which I now held in my hand went in loosely enough. It
was a smaller and an old