the
change which had been made in the occupant of the bed. I waited with
indescribable anxiety, and more than once fancied I heard steps, if
not a feverish breathing close to my bed-head; but no one appeared,
and the nurse in her big chair did not move.

At last I grew weary, and fearful of losing control over my eyelids, I
fixed my gaze upon the glass, as if in so doing I should find a
talisman to keep me awake, when, great God! what was it I saw! A hand,
a creeping hand coming from nowhere and joined to nothing, closing
about that glass and drawing it slowly away till it disappeared
entirely from before my eyes!

I gasped--I could not help it--but I did not stir. For now I knew I
was asleep and dreaming. But no, I pinch myself under the clothes, and
find that I am very wide awake indeed; and then--look! look! the glass
is returning; the hand--a woman's hand--is slowly setting it back in
its place, and--

With a bound I have that hand in my grasp. It is a living hand, and it
is very warm and strong and fierce, and the glass has fallen and lies
shattered between us, and a double cry is heard, one from behind the
partition, through an opening in which this hand had been thrust, and
one from the nurse, who has jumped to her feet and is even now
assisting me in holding the struggling member, upon which I have
managed to scratch a tell-tale mark with a piece of the fallen glass.
At sight of the iron-like grip which this latter lays upon the
intruding member, I at once release my own grasp.

"Hold on," I cried, and leaping from the bed, I hastened first to my
patient, whom I carefully reassured, and then into the hall, where I
found the landlady running to see what was the matter. "I have found
the wretch," I cried, and drawing her after me, hurried about to the
other side of the partition, where I found a closet, and in it the
woman I had met on the stairs, but glaring now like a tiger in her
rage, menace, and fear.

That woman was my humble little patient's bitter but unknown enemy.
Enamoured of a man who--unwisely, perhaps--had expressed in her
hearing his admiration for the pretty typewriter, she had conceived
the idea that he intended to marry the latter, and, vowing vengeance,
had taken up her abode in the same house with the innocent girl,
where, had it not been for the fortunate circumstance of my meeting
her on the stairs, she would certainly have carried out her scheme of
vile and secret murder. The poison