"The doctor will interfere with nothing that I do in this house to-night. I tell you to stay. There are empty rooms on the floor above this. Take one of them."

Mr. Bashwood felt the trembling fit coming on him again as he looked at her. "May I ask-?" he began.

"Ask nothing. I want you."
"Will you please to tell me-?"

"I will tell you nothing till the night is over and the morning has come."

His curiosity conquered his fear. He persisted.

sure that Mr. Armadale goes into the room I have just pointed out to you, and that he doesn't leave it afterward. If you lose sight of the room for a single moment before I come back you will repent it to the end of your life. If you do as I tell you you shall see me to-morrow and claim your own reward. Quick with your answer! Is it Yes or No?"

He could make no reply in words. He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it rapturously. She left him in the room. From his place at the grating he saw her glide down the corridor to the staircase-door. She passed through it

"Is it something dreadful?" he whispered. and locked it. Then there was silence. "Too dreadful to tell me?"

She stamped her foot with a sudden outbreak of impatience. "Go!" she said, snatching the key of the staircase-door from the window-sill. "You do quite right to distrust me-you do quite right to follow me no farther in the dark. Go before the house is shut up. I can do without you." She led the way to the stairs, with the key in one hand and the candle in the other. Mr. Bashwood followed her in silence. No one, knowing what he knew of her earlier life, could have failed to perceive that she was a woman driven to the last extremity, and standing consciously on the brink of a Crime. In the first terror of the discovery he broke free from the hold she had on him-he thought and acted like a man who had a will of his own again.

She put the key in the door and turned to him before she opened it with the light of the candle on her face. "Forget me and forgive me," she said. "We meet no more."

The next sound was the sound of the womenservants' voices. Two of them came up to put the sheets on the beds in No. 3 and No. 4. The women were in high good-humor, laughing and talking to each other through the open doors of the rooms. The master's customers were coming in at last, they said, with a vengeance; the house would soon begin to look cheerful, if things went on like this.

After a little the beds were got ready, and the women returned to the kitchen-floor, on which the sleeping-rooms of the domestic servants were all situated. Then there was silence again.

The next sound was the sound of the doctor's voice. He appeared at the end of the corridor, showing Allan and Midwinter the way to their rooms. They all went together into No. 4. After a little the doctor came out first. He waited till Midwinter joined him, and pointed with a formal bow to the door of No. 3. Midwinter entered the room without speaking and shut himself in. The doctor, left alone, withdrew to the staircase-door and unlocked it-then waited in the corridor, whistling to himself softly, under his breath.

Voices pitched cautiously low became audible in a minute more in the hall. The Resident

She opened the door, and, standing inside it, after he had passed her gave him her hand. He had resisted her look, he had resisted her words, but the magnetic fascination of her touch conquered him at the final moment. "I can't leave you!" he said, holding helplessly by the hand she had given him. "What must I do?" "Come and see," she answered, without al- Dispenser and the Head Nurse appeared on lowing him an instant to reflect. their way to the Dormitories of the Attendants Closing her hand firmly on his she led him at the top of the house. The man bowed silentalong the first-floor corridor to the room num-ly and passed the doctor; the woman courtesied bered 4. "Notice that room," she whispered. silently and followed the man. The doctor acAfter a look over the stairs to see that they were knowledged their salutations by a courteous wave alone, she retraced her steps with him to the op- of his hand; and once more left alone, paused posite extremity of the corridor. Here, facing a moment, still whistling softly to himself-then the window which lit the place at the other end, walked to the door of No. 4, and opened the was one little room, with a narrow grating in case of the fumigating apparatus fixed near it the higher part of the door, intended for the in the corner of the wall. As he lifted the lid sleeping apartment of the doctor's deputy. From and looked in his whistling ceased. He took a the position of this room the grating command-long purple bottle out, examined it by the gased a view of the bedchambers down each side light, put it back, and closed the case. This of the corridor, and so enabled the deputy-phy-done, he advanced on tip-toe to the open stairsician to inform himself of any irregular pro- case-door, passed through it, and secured it on ceedings on the part of the patients under his the inner side as usual. care, with little or no chance of being detected himself. Miss Gwilt opened the door and led the way into the empty room.

"Wait here," she said, "while I go back up stairs, and lock yourself in, if you like. You will be in the dark, but the gas will be burning in the corridor. Keep at the grating and make VOL. XXXIII.-No. 194.-0

Mr. Bashwood had seen him at the apparatus; Mr. Bashwood had noticed the manner of his withdrawal through the staircase-door. Again the sense of an unutterable expectation throbbed at his heart. A terror that was slow and cold and deadly crept into his hands, and guided them in the dark to the key that had

been left for him in the inner side of the door. | now narrowed its range, and centred itself obHe turned it in vague distrust of what might stinately in Allan's room. Resigning all furhappen next, and waited.

The slow minutes passed and nothing happened. The silence was horrible; the solitude of the lonely corridor was a solitude of invisible treacheries. He began to count to keep his mind employed-to keep his own growing dread away from him. The numbers, as he whispered them, followed each other slowly up to a hundred, and still nothing happened. He had begun the second hundred; he had got on to twenty-when, without a sound to betray that he had been moving in his room, Midwinter suddenly appeared in the corridor.

No

ther effort to connect his suspicion of a conspiracy against his friend, with the outrage which had the day before been offered to himself-an effort which would have led him, if he could have maintained it, to a discovery of the Fraud really contemplated by his wife-his mind, clouded and confused by disturbing influences, instinctively took refuge in its impressions of facts as they had shown themselves, since he had entered the house. Every thing that he had noticed below stairs suggested that there was some secret purpose to be answered by getting them to sleep in the Sanatorium. Every thing that he had noticed above stairs associated the lurking-place in which the danger lay hid with Allan's room. To reach this conclusion, and to decide on baffling the conspiracy, whatever it might be, by taking Allan's place, was with Midwinter the work of an instant. Confronted by actual peril the great nature of the man intuitively freed itself from the weaknesses that had beset it in happier and safer times. Not even the shadow of the old superstition rested on his mind now-no fatalist suspicion of himself disturbed the steady resolution that was in him. The one last doubt that troubled him, as he stood at the window thinking, was the doubt whether he could persuade Allan to change rooms with him, without involving himself in an explanation which might lead Allan to sus

He stood for a moment and listened; he went to the stairs and looked over into the hall beneath. Then, for the second time that night, he tried the staircase-door, and for the second time found it fast. After a moment's reflection he tried the doors of the bedrooms on his right hand next, looked into one after the other, and saw that they were empty, then came to the door of the end room in which the steward was concealed. Here again the lock resisted him. He listened, and looked up at the grating. sound was to be heard; no light was to be seen inside. "Shall I break the door in," he said to himself, "and make sure? No; it would be giving the doctor an excuse for turning me out of the house." He moved away and looked into the two empty rooms in the row occupied by Allan and himself, then walked to the win-pect the truth. dow at the staircase end of the corridor. Here In the minute that clapsed, while he waited the case of the fumigating apparatus attracted his attention. After trying vainly to open it his suspicion seemed to be aroused. He searched back along the corridor, and observed that no object of a similar kind appeared outside any of the other bedchambers. Again at the window, he looked again at the apparatus, and turned away from it with a gesture which plainly indicated that he had tried, and failed, to guess what it might be.

Baffled at all points, he still showed no sign of returning to his bedchamber. He stood at the window, with his eyes fixed on the door of Allan's room, thinking. If Mr. Bashwood, furtively watching him through the grating, could have seen him at that moment in the mind as well as in the body, Mr. Bashwood's heart might have throbbed even faster than it was throbbing now, in expectation of the next event which Midwinter's decision of the next minute was to bring forth.

On what was his mind occupied as he stood alone at the dead of night in the strange house? His mind was occupied in drawing its disconnected impressions together, little by little, to one point. Convinced, from the first, that some hidden danger threatened Allan in the Sanatorium, his distrust-vaguely associated thus far with the place itself; with his wife (whom he firmly believed to be now under the same roof with him); with the doctor, who was as plainly in her confidence as Mr. Bashwood himself

with his eyes on the room, the doubt was resolved-he found the trivial yet sufficient excuse of which he was in search. Mr. Bashwood saw him rouse himself, and go to the door. Mr. Bashwood heard him knock softly, and whisper, "Allan, are you in bed ?"

"No," answered the voice inside, "come in." He appeared to be on the point of entering the room when he checked himself as if he had suddenly remembered something. "Wait a minute," he said, through the door, and, turning away, went straight to the end room. "If there is any body watching us in there," he said, aloud, "let him watch us through this!" He took out his handkerchief and stuffed it into the wires of the grating so as completely to close the aperture. Having thus forced the spy inside (if there was one) either to betray himself by moving the handkerchief, or to remain blinded to all view of what might happen next, Midwinter presented himself in Allan's room.

"You know what poor nerves I have," he said, "and what a wretched sleeper I am at the best of times. I can't sleep to-night. The window in my room rattles every time the wind blows. I wish it was as fast as your window here."

"My dear fellow!" cried Allan, "I don't mind a rattling window. Let's change rooms. Nonsense! Why should you make excuses to me? Don't I know how easily trifles upset those excitable nerves of yours? Now the doctor has quieted my mind about my poor little Neelie, I

begin to feel the journey-and I'll answer for sleeping any where till to-morrow comes.' He took up his traveling-bag. "We must be quick about it," he added, pointing to his candle. "They haven't left me much candle to go to bed by."

"Be very quiet, Allan,” said Midwinter, opening the door for him. "We mustn't disturb the house at this time of night."

"Yes, yes," returned Allan, in a whisper. "Good-night-I hope you'll sleep as well as I

shall."

Midwinter saw him into No. 3, and noticed that his own candle (which he had left there) was as short as Allan's. "Good-night," "he said, and came out again into the corridor.

The minute-hand of the clock traveled on half-way round the circle of the dial. As it touched the quarter past one Miss Gwilt stepped noiselessly into the corridor. "Let yourself out," she whispered through the grating, "and follow me." She returned to the stairs by which she had just descended; pushed the door to softly after Mr. Bashwood had followed her; and led the way up to the landing of the second floor. There she put the question to him which she had not ventured to put below stairs:

"Was Mr. Armadale shown into No. 4?" she asked.

He bowed his head without speaking. "Answer me in words. Has Mr. Armadale left the room since ?"

He answered, "No."

"Have you never lost sight of No. 4 since I left you?"

He answered, "Never."

He went straight to the grating, and looked and listened once more. The handkerchief remained exactly as he had left it, and still there was no sound to be heard within. He returned slowly along the corridor, and thought of the Something strange in his manner, something precautions he had taken for the last time. Was unfamiliar in his voice, as he made that last rethere no other way than the way he was trying ply, attracted her attention. She took her cannow? There was none. Any openly-avowed dle from a table near, on which she had left it, posture of defense-while the nature of the dan- and threw its light on him. His eyes were ger, and the quarter from which it might come, staring, his teeth chattered. There was every were alike unknown-would be useless in itself, thing to betray him to her as a terrified manand worse than useless in the consequences which there was nothing to tell her that the terror was it might produce by putting the people of the caused by his consciousness of deceiving her, for house on their guard. Without a fact that could the first time in his life, to her face. If she had justify to other minds his distrust of what might threatened him less openly; if she had spoken happen with the night; incapable of shaking less unreservedly of the interview which was to Allan's ready faith in the fair outside which the reward him in the morning, he might have owned doctor had presented to him, the one safeguard the truth. As it was, his strongest fears and in his friend's interests that Midwinter could set his dearest hopes were alike interested in telling up was the safeguard of changing the rooms-her the fatal lie that he had now told—the fatal the one policy he could follow, come what might lie which he reiterated when she put her quesof it, was the policy of waiting for events. "Ition for the second time. can trust to one thing," he said to himself, as he looked for the last time up and down the corridor-"I can trust myself to keep awake."

After a glance at the clock on the wall opposite he went into No. 4. The sound of the closing door was heard, the sound of the turning lock followed it. Then the dead silence fell over the house once more.

Little by little the steward's horror of the

stillness and the darkness overcame his dread of moving the handkerchief. He cautiously drew aside one corner of it-waited-looked-and took courage at last to draw the whole handkerchief through the wires of the grating. After first hiding it in his pocket, he thought of the consequences if it was found on him, and threw it down in a corner of the room. He trembled when he had cast it from him, as he looked at his watch and placed himself again at the grating to wait for Miss Gwilt.

It was a quarter to one. The moon had come round from the side to the front of the Sanatorium. From time to time her light gleamed on the window of the corridor, when the gaps in the flying clouds let it through. The wind had risen, and sung its mournful song faintly, as it swept at intervals over the desert ground in front of the house.

She looked at him, deceived by the last man on earth whom she would have suspected of deception-the man whom she had deceived herself.

"You seem to be over-excited," she said, quietly. "The night has been too much for you. Go up stairs and rest. You will find the door of one of the rooms left open. That is the room you are to occupy. Good-night."

She put the candle (which she had left burning for him) on the table, and gave him her hand. He held her back by it desperately as she turned to leave him. His horror of what might happen when she was left by herself forced the words to his lips which he would have feared to speak to her at any other time.

"Don't," he pleaded in a whisper; "oh, don't, don't, don't go down stairs to-night!"

She released her hand, and signed to him to take the candle. "You shall see me to-mor

row," she said. "Not a word more now!"

Her stronger will conquered him at that last moment, as it had conquered him throughout. He took the candle and waited-following her eagerly with his eyes as she descended the stairs. The cold of the December night seemed to have found its way to her through the warmth of the house. She had put on a long, heavy black

the night-view through the window slowly darkened.

shawl, and had fastened it close over her breast. The plated coronet in which she wore her hair seemed to have weighed too heavily on her head. She had untwisted it, and thrown it back over her shoulders. The old man looked at her flowing hair, as it lay red over the black shawl -at her supple, long-fingered hand, as it slid down the balusters-at the smooth, seductive grace of every movement that took her farther and farther away from him. "The night will go quickly," he said to himself as she passed from his view; "I shall dream of her till the morning the faint sound as it died away into silence ing comes!"

She locked the staircase-door after she had passed through it-listened, and satisfied herself that nothing was stirring-then went on slowly along the corridor to the window. Leaning on the window-sill she looked out at the night. The clouds were over the moon at that moment; nothing was to be seen through the darkness but the scattered gaslights in the suburb. Turning from the window she looked at the clock. It was twenty minutes past one.

For the last time the resolution that had come to her in the earlier night, with the knowledge that her husband was in the house, forced itself uppermost in her mind. For the last time the voice within her said, “Think if there is no other way!"

She pondered over it till the minute-hand of the clock pointed to the half hour. "No!" she said, stil thinking of her husband. "The one chance left is to go through with it to the end. He will leave the thing undone which he has come here to do; he will leave the words unspoken which he has come here to say-when he knows that the act may make me a public scandal, and that the words may send me to the scaffold!" Her color rose, and she smiled with a terrible irony as she looked for the first time at the door of the Room. "I shall be your widow," she said, "in half an hour!"

The restlessness that had driven her up and down the stairs, and backward and forward in the hall, left her as suddenly as it had come. She waited through the second interval, leaning on the window-sill, and staring, without conscious thought of any kind, into the black night. The howling of a belated dog was borne toward her on the wind at intervals from some distant part of the suburb. She found herself follow

with a dull attention, and listening for its coming again with an expectation that was duller still. Her arms lay like lead on the windowsill; her forehead rested against the glass without feeling the cold. It was not till the moon struggled out again that she was startled into sudden self-remembrance. She turned quickly, and looked at the clock; seven minutes had passed since the second Pouring.

As she snatched up the Flask, and fed the funnel for the third time, the full consciousness of her position came back to her. The feverheat throbbed again in her blood, and flushed fiercely in her checks. Swift, smooth, and noiseless, she paced from end to end of the corridor, with her arms folded in her shawl, and her eye moment after moment on the clock.

Three out of the next five minutes passed, and again the suspense began to madden her. The space in the corridor grew too confined for the illimitable restlessness that possessed her limbs. She went down into the hall again, and circled round and round it like a wild creature in a cage. At the third turn she felt something moving softly against her dress. The house-cat had come up through the open kitchen-door-a large, tawny, companionable cat that purred in high good temper, and followed her for company. She took the animal up in her arms-it rubbed its sleek head luxuriously against her chin as she bent her face over it. "Armadale hates She opened the case of the apparatus, and cats," she whispered in the creature's ear; "come took the Purple Flask in her hand. After mark-up and see Armadale killed!" The next moing the time by a glance at the clock she dropped into the glass funnel the first of the six separate Pourings that were measured for her by the paper slips.

When she had put the Flask back she listened at the mouth of the funnel. Not a sound reached her ear: the deadly process did its work in the silence of death itself. When she rose and looked up the moon was shining in at the window, and the moaning wind was quiet. Oh, the time! the time! If it could only have been begun and ended with the first Pouring! She went down stairs into the hall she walked to and fro, and listened at the open door that led to the kitchen stairs. She came up again; she went down again. The first of the intervals of five minutes was endless. The time stood still. The suspense was maddening.

The interval passed. As she took the Flask for the second time and dropped in the second Pouring the clouds floated over the moon, and

ment her own frightful fancy horrified her. She dropped the cat with a shudder; she drove it below again with threatening hands. For a moment after she stood still-then, in headlong haste, suddenly mounted the stairs. Her husband had forced his way back again into her thoughts; her husband threatened her with a danger which had never entered her mind till now. What if he were not asleep? What if he came out upon her and found her with the Purple Flask in her hand?

She stole to the door of No. 3, and listened. The slow, regular breathing of a sleeping man was just audible. After waiting a moment to let the feeling of relief quiet her she took a step toward No. 4, and checked herself. It was needless to listen at that door. The doctor had told her that Sleep came first, as certainly as Death afterward, in the poisoned air. She looked aside at the clock. The time had come for the fourth Pouring.

Her hand began to tremble violently as she fed the funnel for the fourth time. The fear of her husband was back again in her heart. What if some noise disturbed him before the sixth Pouring? What if he woke on a sudden (as she had often seen him wake) without any noise at all?

to the visitors. Twice she missed it. The third time her eyes helped her hands-she found the button and pressed on it. The mortice of the lock inside fell back, and the door, yielded to her.

Without an instant's hesitation she entered the room. Though the door was open-though so short a time had elapsed since the fourth Pouring that but little more than half the contemplated volume of gas had been produced as yet-the poisoned air seized her, like the grasp of a hand at her throat, like the twisting of a wire round her head. She found him on the

She looked up and down the corridor. The end room, in which Mr. Bashwood had been concealed, offered itself to her as a place of refuge. "I might go in there!" she thought. "Has he left the key?" She opened the door to look, and saw the handkerchief thrown down on the floor. Was it Mr. Bashwood's handker-floor at the foot of the bed-his head and one chief, left there by accident? She examined it at the corners. In the second corner she found her husband's name!

Her first impulse hurried her to the staircasedoor to rouse the steward and insist on an explanation. The next moment she remembered the Purple Flask, and the danger of leaving the corridor. She turned and looked at the door of No. 3. Her husband, on the evidence of the handkerchief, had unquestionably been out of his room-and Mr. Bashwood had not told her. Was he in his room now? In the violence of her agitation, as the question passed through her mind, she forgot the discovery which she had herself made not a minute before. Again she listened at the door; again she heard the slow regular breathing of the sleeping man. The first time, the evidence of her ears had been enough to quiet her. This time, in the tenfold aggravation of her suspicion and her alarm, she was determined to have the evidence of her eyes as well. "All the doors open softly in this house," she said to herself; "there's no fear of my waking him." Noiselessly, by an inch at a time, she opened the unlocked door, and looked in the moment the aperture was wide enough. In the little light she had let into the room the sleeper's head was just visible on the pillow. Was it quite as dark against the white pillow as her husband's head looked when he was in bed? Was the breathing as light as her husband's breathing when he was asleep?

Her

arm were toward the door as if he had risen un-
der the first feeling of drowsiness, and had sunk
in the effort to leave the room. With the des-
perate concentration of strength of which wo-
men are capable in emergencies she lifted him
and dragged him out into the corridor.
brain reeled as she laid him down and crawled
back on her knees to the room, to shut out the
poisoned air from pursuing them into the pas
sage. After closing the door she waited, with-
out daring to look at him the while, for strength
enough to rise and get to the window over the
stairs. When the window was opened, when
the keen air of the early winter morning blew
steadily in, she ventured back to him and raised
his head, and looked for the first time closely at
his face.

Was it death that spread the livid pallor over his forehead and his cheeks, and the dull leaden hue on his eyelids and his lips?

She loosened his cravat and opened his waistcoat, and bared his throat and breast to the air. With her hand on his heart, with her bosom supporting his head so that he fronted the window, she waited the event. A time passed: a time short enough to be reckoned by minutes on the clock; and yet long enough to take her memory back over all her married life with him-long enough to mature the resolution that now rose in her mind as the one result that could come of the retrospect. As her eyes rested on him a strange composure settled slowly on her She opened the door more widely, and looked | face. She bore the look of a woman who was in by the clearer light.

There lay the man whose life she had attempted for the third time, peacefully sleeping in the room that had been given to her husband, and in the air that could harm nobody!

The inevitable conclusion overwhelmed her on the instant. With a frantic upward action of her hands she staggered back into the passage. The door of Allan's room fell to-but not noisily enough to wake him. She turned as she heard it close. For one moment she stood staring at it like a woman stupefied. The next, her instinct rushed into action before her reason recovered itself. In two steps she was at the door of No. 4.

The door was locked.

She felt over the wall with both hands, wildly and clumsily, for the button which she had seen the doctor press, when he was showing the room

equally resigned to welcome the chance of his recovery or to accept the certainty of his death.

Not a cry or a tear had escaped her yet. Not a cry or a tear escaped her when the interval had passed, and she felt the first faint fluttering of his heart, and heard the first faint catching of the breath at his lips. She silently bent over him and kissed his forehead. When she looked up again the hard despair had melted from her face. There was something softly radiant in her eyes, which lit her whole countenance as with an inner light, and made her womanly and lovely once more.

She laid him down, and, taking off her shawl, made a pillow of it to support his head. "It might have been hard, love," she said, as she felt the faint pulsation strengthening at his heart. "You have made it easy now."

She rose, and, turning from him, noticed the