rops are here?"

"Sixty."

"Is it nasty?"

"No--like very strong bitter almonds or cherry-water; only in excess,"
he said. "Here is some cherry-water. Will you have a little in some
water? It is not nasty, and it will not hurt you."

"No," said Leam with an offended air: "I do not want your horrid
stuff."

"It would not hurt you, and it is really rather nice," returned Alick
apologetically.

"It is horrid," said Learn.

"Well, perhaps you are better without it," Alick answered, quietly
taking the bottle of prussic acid from her hands and replacing it on
the shelf, well barricaded by phials and pots.

"You should not have taken it till I gave it you," said Leam proudly.
"You are rude."

From this time the laboratory had the strangest fascination for Leam.
She was never tired of going there, never tired of asking questions,
all bearing on the subject of poisons, which seemed to have possessed
her. Alick, unsuspecting, glad to teach, glad to see her interest
awakened in anything he did or knew, in his own honest simplicity
utterly unable to imagine that things could turn wrong on such a
matter, told her all she asked and a great deal more; and still Leam's
eyes wandered ever to the shelf where the little phial of thirty
deaths was enclosed within its barricades.

One day while they were there Mrs. Corfield called Alick.

"Wait for me, I shall not be long," he said to Leam, and went out to
his mother.

As he turned Learnm's eyes went again to that small phial of death on
the shelf.

"Take it, Leama! take it, my heart!" she heard her mother whisper.

"Yes, mamma," she said aloud; and leaping like a young panther on the
bench, reached to the shelf and thrust the little bottle in her hair.
She did not know why she took it: she had no motive, no object. It was
mamma who told her--so her unconscious desire translated itself--but
she had no clear understanding why. It was instinct, vague but
powerful, lying at the back of her mind, unknown to herself that it
was there; and all of which she was conscious was a desire to possess
that bottle of poison, and not to let them know here that she had
taken it.

This was on the afternoon of her last day at the Corfields. She was
to go home to-night in preparation for the arrival of her father and
madame to-morrow, and in a few hours she would be away. She did not
want Alick to come back to the laboratory. She was afraid that he
would miss the bottle which she had secu