llan would have gone on talking. Mrs. Beauly
is discreet and stops him.

And what does the nurse (Christina Ormsay) tell us?

On the day of Mrs. Eustace Macallan's death, the nurse is dismissed from
attendance, and is sent downstairs. She leaves the sick woman, recovered
from her first attack of illness, and able to amuse herself with
writing. The nurse remains away for half an hour, and then gets uneasy
at not hearing the invalid's bell. She goes to the Morning-Room to
consult Mr. Macallan, and there she hears that Mrs. Beauly is missing.
Mr. Macallan doesn't know where she is, and asks Mr. Dexter if he has
seen her. Mr. Dexter had not set eyes on her. At what time does the
disappearance of Mrs. Beauly take place? At the very time when Christina
Ormsay had left Mrs. Eustace Macallan alone in her room!

Meanwhile the bell rings at last--rings violently. The nurse goes back
to the sick-room at five minutes to eleven, or thereabouts, and
finds that the bad symptoms of the morning have returned in a gravely
aggravated form. A second dose of poison--larger than the dose
administered in the early morning--has been given during the absence of
the nurse, and (observe) during the disappearance also of Mrs. Beauly.
The nurse looking out into the corridor for help, encounters Mrs. Beauly
herself, innocently on her way from her own room--just up, we are to
suppose, at eleven in the morning!--to inquire after the sick woman.

A little later Mrs. Beauly accompanies Mr. Macallan to visit the
invalid. The dying woman casts a strange look at both of them, and tells
them to leave her. Mr. Macallan understands this as the fretful outbreak
of a person in pain, and waits in the room to tell the nurse that the
doctor is sent for. What does Mrs. Beauly do?

She runs out panic-stricken the instant Mrs. Eustace Macallan looks at
her. Even Mrs. Beauly, it seems, has a conscience!

Is there nothing to justify suspicion in such circumstances as
these--circumstances sworn to on the oaths of the witnesses?

To me the conclusion is plain. Mrs. Beauly's hand gave that second dose
of poison. Admit this; and the inference follows that she also gave the
first dose in the early morning. How could she do it? Look again at
the evidence. The nurse admits that she was asleep from past two in the
morning to six. She also speaks of a locked door of communication with
the sickroom, the key of which had been removed, nobody knew by whom.
Some person must