gas jet, I caused to shine in their eyes the single
drop of yellow liquid it still held. 'Poison!' I impressively announced.
'This trinket may have adorned the bosom of a Borgia or flashed from the
arm of some great Venetian lady as she flourished her fan between her
embittered heart and the object of her wrath or jealousy.'

"The first sentence had come naturally, but the last was spoken at
random, and almost unconsciously. For at the utterance of the word
'poison' a quickly suppressed cry had escaped the lips of some one
behind me, which, while faint enough to elude the attention of any ear
less sensitive than my own, contained such an astonishing, if
involuntary, note of self-betrayal that my mind grew numb with horror,
and I stood staring at the fearful toy which had called up such a
revelation of--what? That is what I am here to ask, first of myself,
then of you. For the two women pressing behind me were----"

"Who?" I sharply demanded, partaking in some indefinable way of his
excitement and alarm.

"Gilbertine Murray and Dorothy Camerden!"--his prospective bride and the
woman I loved and whom he knew I loved, though I had kept my secret
quite successfully from every one else!

The look we exchanged neither of us will ever forget.

"Describe the sound," I presently said.

"I cannot," he replied. "I can only give you my impression of it. You,
like myself, fought in more than one skirmish in the Cuban War. Did you
ever hear the cry made by a wounded man when the cup of cool water for
which he has long agonised is brought suddenly before his eyes? Such a
sound, with all that goes to make it eloquent, did I hear from one of
the two girls who leaned over my shoulder. Can you understand this
amazing, this unheard-of circumstance? Can you name the woman--can you
name the grief capable of making either of these seemingly happy and
innocent girls hail the sight of such a doubtful panacea, with an
unconscious ebullition of joy? You would clear my wedding-eve of a great
dread if you could, for if this expression of concealed misery came from
Gilbertine----"

"Do you mean," I cried in vehement protest, "that you really are in
doubt as to which of these two women uttered the cry which so startled
you? That you positively cannot tell whether it was Gilbertine
or--or----"

"I cannot; as God lives, I cannot! I was too dazed, too confounded by
the unexpected circumstance, to turn at once, and when I did, it was to
see bot