x
from the night-table, taken from its velvet lining both the syringe and
the vial containing the morphia tablets, and gone to the mantel-piece to
melt one of the tablets in a little of the distilled water there. Her
back was turned upon us, and she was a long time. I was standing; Peters
in his arm-chair, smoking. Clodagh then began to talk about a Charity
Bazaar which she had visited that afternoon.

She was long, she was long. The crazy thought passed through some dim
region of my soul: 'Why is she so _long_?'

'Ah, that was a pain!' went Peters: 'never mind the bazaar, aunt--think
of the morphia.'

Suddenly an irresistible impulse seized me--to rush upon her, to dash
syringe, tabloids, glass, and all, from her hands. I _must_ have obeyed
it--I was on the tip-top point of obeying--my body already leant prone:
but at that instant a voice at the opened door behind me said:

'Well, how is everything?'

It was Wilson, the electrician, who stood there. With lightning
swiftness I remembered an under-look of mistrust which I had once seen
on his face. Oh, well, I would not, and could not!--she was my love--I
stood like marble...

Clodagh went to meet Wilson with frank right hand, in the left being the
fragile glass containing the injection. My eyes were fastened on her
face: it was full of reassurance, of free innocence. I said to myself:
'I must surely be mad!'

An ordinary chat began, while Clodagh turned up Peters' sleeve, and,
kneeling there, injected his fore-arm. As she rose, laughing at
something said by Wilson, the drug-glass dropped from her hand, and her
heel, by an apparent accident, trod on it. She put the syringe among a
number of others on the mantel-piece.

'Your friend has been naughty, Mr. Wilson,' she said again with that
same pout: 'he has been taking more atropine.'

'Not really?' said Wilson.

'Let me alone, the whole of you,' answered Peters: 'I ain't a child.'

These were the last intelligible words he ever spoke. He died shortly
before 1 A.M. He had been poisoned by a powerful dose of atropine.

From that moment to the moment when the _Boreal_ bore me down the
Thames, all the world was a mere tumbling nightmare to me, of which
hardly any detail remains in my memory. Only I remember the inquest, and
how I was called upon to prove that Peters had himself injected himself
with atropine. This was corroborated by Wilson, and by Clodagh: and the
verdict was in accordance.

And in all that