e.

It was the hour for Dr. Fallows' prescription.

"Really," Fanny Brassfield exclaimed, in her high-pitched, insolent
voice, "I must get myself one of these--what is he again? Zanzibari?"

Hamoud, towering there in the attire of an Oman gentleman--which she
took for a specially effective livery--contemplated the great Mrs.
Brassfield. His full eyelids were dreamily lowered over his lustrous
eyes. His long, straight nose seemed narrower than usual, perhaps from
disdain. But his clear-cut carnelian mouth, vivid between his faint
mustache and his delicate beard, did not change expression, although he
was calling the great Mrs. Brassfield a female beneath the contempt of
a Muscat slaver, the progeny of camels and alley dogs, and other names
besides. As if regretfully he turned away to David Verne, measured out
the solution of arsenic, and presented the goblet, a tapering treasure
covered with gilt and crimson protuberances, an antique that had stood
before men in the wave-lapped palaces of Venice, brimming with Greek
wine, or maybe with Renaissance poison.

David Verne himself raised the goblet.

"Dr. Fallows has really done wonders, hasn't he?"

"Wonders," Lilla echoed with a smile.

In the hall, as she was leaving, Fanny Brassfield said to Lilla:

"By the way, Anna Zanidov is in town. She was asking after you."

Without moving, Lilla murmured slowly:

"Ah, she wants to tell my fortune again, perhaps?"

"She stopped doing that. It got too uncanny. You know yourself that
everything she ever predicted came to pass. Including three deaths;
that is, two besides----"

"One must believe that she sees it," Lilla assented, and, frozen by her
thoughts, shuddered violently. "Yes, too uncanny! She did well to
give it up."

"Especially as people were getting to be afraid of her," said Fanny
Brassfield, while passing through the front doorway.

CHAPTER XXXVI

While David worked behind the closed doors of the study, Lilla, sitting
down in a damask-covered chair, tried to concentrate her mind on the
new books from New York.

She skimmed the novels to the point where the lovers had their first
embrace, then turned to poems by women, which were pervaded with a
melancholy derived perhaps from disillusionment. As a corrective she
read the books on world politics, economics, esthetic philosophy. In
these last she found, eloquently expressed, the most characteristic
argument of the times--a persuasion t