d the Doctor, "though, as you say, I hate
chemistry. I should think that substance, applied to any vital part of
the body, and kept there continuously, would produce racking pains and
weakness, and be very likely to result in a disease resembling
inflammatory rheumatism, or possibly paralysis, and death."

"Thank you--thank you a dozen times," said Joe, springing up and
grasping the Doctor very warmly by the hand. "You do not know how much
good you may be doing by this examination; but you _shall_ know,
sometime--I will tell you all about it. And now good-night!" rolling up
the package and putting it back into her pocket. "My time is up, Mother
will be worried about me, and I have a borrowed carriage waiting at the
corner."

"Allow me to see you to it," said the Doctor, rising with quick
courtesy.

"No farther than the gate, for the world," said the young girl. "For
certain reasons, which you shall know some time, I must not be seen in
your company to-night, even by the coachman."

She tripped away instantly, the Doctor accompanying her to the
gate,--and rolled away homeward at once. What a day that had been to
her! And in what a whirl was her brain when she reflected on all she had
discovered and tried to arrange in her own mind the details of what she
yet felt it necessary to do! It was within forty-eight hours after, and
when her mind had not become at all calmed from the thoughts of the
crime surrounding her and those she loved, that the visit to the
sorceress was made, as before recorded. How much of additional
information she may really have expected to gain from the sorceress, it
is impossible to say,--or whether this matter of the attempted poisoning
was really the matter which sent her to that questionable fountain of
intelligence; but it is not at all strange that she should have blended
the terrors of the real and the imaginary together, and been powerfully
impressed by the events of that day which marked so important an era in
her existence.

It may be said here, that two days after the events just narrated, when
Bell accompanied her to the sorceress, she did not see Richard Crawford.
Thereafter, for many days, she did not visit the house at all, for
reasons that will soon make themselves manifest; and consequently the
awkwardness of any meeting with the invalid, which might have involved
questions she did not care to answer at that moment, was avoided. Joe
Harris felt that for once in her life she had