“She advanced, a glass in either hand. As she came, the floor swayed, and the walls seemed to bow together; but they did not sway her. Step by step, she drew near, and when she reached my side she smiled in my face once. Then she said: ‘Choose aright, dear heart. Leave the poisoned one for me.’
“Fascinated, I stared at one glass, then at the other. Had either of her hands trembled, I should have grasped at the glass it held; but not a tremor shook those icy fingers, nor did her eyes wander to the right hand or to the left. ‘Adelaide!’ I shrieked out. ‘Toss them behind you. Let us live—live!’ But she only reiterated that awful word: ‘Choose!’ and I dare not hesitate longer, lest I lose my chance to save her. Groping, I touched a glass—I never knew which one—and drawing it from her fingers, I lifted it to my mouth. Instantly her other hand rose. ‘I don’t know which is which, myself,’ she said, and drank. That made me drink, also.
“The two glasses sent out a clicking sound as we set them back on the stand. Then we waited, looking at each other. ‘Which?’ her lips seemed to say. ‘Which?’ In another moment we knew. ‘Your choice was the right one,’ said she, and she sank back into a chair. ‘Don’t leave me!’ she called out, for I was about to run shrieking out into the night. ‘I—I am happy now that it is all settled; but I do not want to die alone. Oh, how hot I am!’ And leaping up, she flung off her coat, and went gasping about the room for air. When she sank down again, it was on the lounge; and again I tried to fly for help, and again she would not let me. Suddenly she started up, and I saw a great change in her. The heavy, leaden look was gone; tenderness had come back to her eyes, and a human anxious expression to her whole face. ‘I have been mad!’ she cried. ‘Carmel, Carmel, what have I done to you, my more than sister—my child, my child!’
“I tried to soothe her—to keep down my awful fear and soothe her. But the nearness of death had calmed her poor heart into its old love and habitual thoughtfulness. She was terrified at my position. She recalled our mother, and the oath she had taken at that mother’s death-bed to protect me and care for me and my brother. ‘And I have failed to do either,’ she cried. ‘Arthur, I have alienated, and you I am leaving to unknown trouble and danger,’
“She was not to be comforted. I saw her life ebbing and could do nothing. She clung to me while she called up all her powers, and made plans for me and showed me a way of escape. I was to burn the note, fling two of the glasses from the window and leave the other and the deadly phial near her hand. This, before I left the room. Then I was to call up the police and say there was something wrong at the club-house, but I was not to give my name or ever acknowledge I was there. ‘Nothing can save trouble,’ she said, ‘but that trouble must not come near you. Swear that you will heed my words—swear that you will do what I say,’
“I swore. All that she asked I promised. I was almost dying, too; and had the light gone out and the rafters of the house fallen in and buried us both, it would have been better. But the light burned on, and the life in her eyes faded out, and the hands grasping mine relaxed. I heard one little gasp; then a low prayer: ‘Tell Arthur never—never—again to—’ Then—silence!”
Sobs—cries—veiled faces—then silence in the courtroom, too. It was broken but by one sound, a heartrending sigh from the prisoner. But nobody looked at him, and thank God!—nobody looked at me. Every eye was on the face of this young girl, whose story bore such an impress of truth, and yet was so contradictory of all former evidence. What revelations were yet to follow. It would seem that she was speaking of her sister’s death.
But her sister had not died that way; her sister had been strangled. Could this dainty creature, with beauty scarred and yet powerfully triumphant, be the victim of an hallucination as to the cause of that scar and the awesome circumstances which attended its infliction? Or, harder still to believe, were these soul-compelling tones, these evidences of grief, this pathetic yielding to the rights of the law in face of the heart’s natural shrinking from disclosures sacred as they were tragic—were these the medium by which she sought to mislead justice and to conceal truth?
Even I, with my memory of her looks as she faltered down the staircase on that memorable night—pale, staring, her left hand to her cheek and rocking from side to side in pain or terror—could not but ask if this heart-rending story did not involve a still more terrible sequel. I searched her face, and racked my very soul, in my effort to discern what lay beneath this angelic surface—beneath this recital which if it were true and the whole truth, would call not only for the devotion of a lifetime, but a respect transcending love and elevating it to worship.
But, in her cold and quiet features, I could detect nothing beyond the melancholy of grief; and the suspense from which all suffered, kept me also on the rack, until at a question from Mr. Moffat she spoke again, and we heard her say: