“I will drink it,” she said, “and then perhaps you will believe in me.”
With a hand as steady as a rock he held the bowl to her lips. Her teeth chattered on its rim a moment, and then she drank, and stopped.
“To the dregs,” he said quietly.
She took the cup from his hand, and, looking him straight in the eyes, drained it, threw it from her, and closing her lids, lay back.
One moment he stood gazing down, then, beckoning to his attendant, very softly left the room, locking the door behind him.
She never moved, she never opened her eyes. Still, as though death had already seized her, she lay there, a creeping rigor seeming to paralyse her limbs. Only her brain was busy, deliriously, unceasingly, gnawing like a rat in an empty house. What conscious reason it possessed was absorbed exclusively in the coming horror of her passing. She was stunned beyond any thought of eternity, or of the part her sinful soul must play in it. Love—the love of earth, of man, of power—was a thing shrunk to insignificance, a dreary, discredited enchantment. The thought of the poison that possessed her absorbed her whole being. She had nothing left in common with that sweet, fantastic conceit, a desirable woman. She was gold turned grey and acrid from contact with mercury—a thing preposterous and contaminated. How was the bane about to act, to assert its hideous mastery? Already strange stings and tremors were apparent in her veins. Was she to be drugged into a merciful oblivion, or wrenched and distorted out of all semblance to humanity? Fearful memories of tales she had heard whispered thronged into her mind. He would not have spared her the worst; why should he, a vengeance revealed so soulless, so calculatingly diabolic?
She felt the poison creeping up her veins. When it reached her heart, it would seize on there, she knew, and tear her to death with its red-hot fangs. A mortal terror throttled her; she was dying, helpless, abandoned, alone to all eternity. With a supreme effort she struggled momentarily out of the shadows, and uttered a choking scream.
The key turned in the lock and her husband entered.
“What is it, ma mie?” he said, and hurried to her side.
She turned a grey and ghastly face to him.