“Yes,” she said, turning on him fiercely; “why not?”
“Do you think the doctor is trying to poison me?” asked her husband.
“No, I do not think the doctor is trying to poison you,” she repeated mechanically, as she moved toward a little sideboard in a corner of the room. “But I shall give you all your medicines in this hereafter.”
She stood at the little sideboard, with her back toward them, and she mingled the contents of various phials in the Venetian goblet. Then she turned to cross the room to her husband. As she walked with the glass in her hand there was a rift in the clouds high over the other side of the river, and the rays of the setting sun thrust themselves through the window and lighted up the glory of her hair and showed the strange gleam in her staring eyes. Another step, and the red rays fell on the Venetian glass, and it burned and glowed, and the green serpents twined about its ruby stem seemed to twist and crawl with malignant life, while their scorching eyes shot fire. Another step, and she stood by the bedside. As John Manning reached out his hand for the goblet, a tremor passed through her, her fingers clinched the fragile stem, and the glass fell on the floor and was shattered to shivers as its fellow had been shattered three centuries ago and more. She still stared steadily before her; then her lips parted, and she said, “The glass broke—the glass broke—then the tale is true!” And with one hysteric shriek she fell forward amid the fragments of the Venetian goblet, unconscious thereafter of all things.
THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF.
BY H. C. BUNNER.
The yellow afternoon sun came in through the long blank windows of the room wherein the Superior Court of the State of New York, Part II., Gillespie, Judge, was in session. The hour of adjournment was near at hand, a dozen court-loungers slouched on the hard benches in the attitudes of cramped carelessness which mark the familiar of the halls of justice. Beyond the rail sat a dozen lawyers and lawyers’ clerks, and a dozen weary jurymen. Above the drowsy silence rose the nasal voice of the junior counsel for the defence, who in a high monotone, with his faint eyes fixed on the paper in his hand, was making something like a half-a-score of “requests to charge.”
Nobody paid attention to him. Two lawyers’ clerks whispered like mischievous schoolboys, hiding behind a pile of books that towered upon a table. Junior counsel for the plaintiff chewed his pencil and took advantage of his opportunity to familiarize himself with certain neglected passages of the New Code. The crier, like a half-dormant old spider, sat in his place and watched a boy who was fidget ting at the far end of the room, and who looked as though he wanted to whistle.