line at the top stated that it was a copy made by the
chemist, at the request of a customer. It bore the date of more than
three years since. A morsel of paper was pinned to the prescription,
containing some lines in a woman's handwriting:--"With your enviable
health and strength, my dear, I should have thought you were the last
person in the world to want a tonic. However, here is my prescription,
if you must have it. Be very careful to take the right dose, because
there's poison in it." The prescription contained three ingredients,
strychnine, quinine, and nitro-hydrochloric acid; and the dose was
fifteen drops in water. Mrs. Farnaby lit a match, and burnt the lines of
her friend's writing. "As long ago as that," she reflected, "I thought
of killing myself. Why didn't I do it?"

The paper having been destroyed, she put back the prescription for
indigestion in her dressing-case; hesitated for a moment; and opened the
bedroom window. It looked into a lonely little courtyard. She threw
the dangerous contents of the second and smaller bottle out into the
yard--and then put it back empty on the chimneypiece. After another
moment of hesitation, she returned to the sitting-room, with the bottle
of mixture, and the copied prescription for the tonic strychnine drops,
in her hand.

She put the bottle on the table, and advanced to the fireplace to ring
the bell. Warm as the room was, she began to shiver. Did the eager life
in her feel the fatal purpose that she was meditating, and shrink from
it? Instead of ringing the bell, she bent over the fire, trying to warm
herself.

"Other women would get relief in crying," she thought. "I wish I was
like other women!"

The whole sad truth about herself was in that melancholy aspiration. No
relief in tears, no merciful oblivion in a fainting-fit, for _her._
The terrible strength of the vital organization in this woman knew no
yielding to the unutterable misery that wrung her to the soul. It roused
its glorious forces to resist: it held her in a stony quiet, with a grip
of iron.

She turned away from the fire wondering at herself. "What baseness is
there in me that fears death? What have I got to live for _now?"_
The open letter on the table caught her eye. "This will do it!" she
said--and snatched it up, and read it at last.

"The least I can do for you is to act like a gentleman, and spare you
unnecessary suspense. You will not see me this morning at ten, for the
simple reason t