mself interrupted her, never halting for a word.

"Sir, listen! I am in your power, since without your aid I cannot
escape. I should have been a prisoner now had I not thought of you and
had about me the key of your door. I thought you would save me--I think
you will, for I have already saved you."

"Me!" he exclaimed, wonderingly.

"You! Think you I do not know where you were taken on Saturday night?"

"You knew! Then----"

"I was there--yes. I knew you would be waylaid and taken there. I knew
what you would be asked to do--first, to attend to the injuries of the
foolish one among us who had tried to do what he could not do;
secondly, to finish what he had begun. You are a braver man than I
thought you, and you refused. Without those chemicals we were helpless,
for it is those that were used last night. In that deserted house--our
meeting-place at intervals for the past year--your dead body might have
lain undiscovered for months--would have lain undiscovered in all
probability--for you were dealing with desperate men, and you defied
them. I went there, as I have done twice before since I lived here, and
I pleaded for you and saved you. But I could not have done it except
for one thing--I took with me what they wanted. Gustave understands
chemicals, and how to combine them; he came here, after I had lied to
you about him--for all that story that I told you was one great lie,
told because I knew something of my power over you, and that you would
probably act as you did--hoping that he could here possess himself of
the chemicals that were needed, and which we could not obtain without
too great risk of discovery. You believed every word of the story with
which I befooled you; he came here, and obtained them easily."

Her audacity, her frankness were almost brutal. His bewilderment was
subsiding, but he revolted more and more, understanding so little of
the horrible tree of which such a woman as this was the poisoned and
poisoning fruit.

"Your brother?" he said, withdrawing from her a little farther. "How
did he become possessed of them here?"

"My brother!" she cried, laughing. "He is not my brother; his name is
Boucheafen no more than mine. My name! I have almost forgotten what it
is, I have borne so many that are false; were I to tell you it you
would be no wiser. Where, you ask, did he get the chemicals? From your
laboratory. We stole them; look, examine, and you will find them
missing!"

She stopped, turni