She seated herself at the table, drew the electric reading-lamp which stood on it close to her, laid the slip down in front of her, keeping it unrolled by means of a couple of little weights, and studied it intently for several minutes. Then she made a series of calculations on another sheet of paper, and compared the result carefully with some figures on the slip.
She made them three times over before she was satisfied that they were absolutely correct, and then, with all the care and deliberation of a chemical analyst performing a delicate and important experiment, she proceeded to weigh out tiny quantities of the powders, and to mix them very carefully in the little glass mortar. This done, she emptied the mixture into a little platinum crucible, which she placed on the furnace, at the same time applying a gentle heat.
Then she turned her attention to the phials, measuring off quantities of their contents with the most scrupulous exactitude, mixing them two and two, and adding this mixture to a third, and so on, in a certain order which was evidently prearranged, as she constantly referred to the slip of parchment and her own calculations as she was mixing them.
By the time she finished this part of her work, she had obtained from the various coloured liquids one perfectly colourless and odourless, of a specific gravity apparently considerably in excess of that of water, although, at the same time, it was extremely mobile and refractive. She held it up to the light, looking at it with her eyelids somewhat screwed up, and with a cruel smile on her pretty lips.
“So far, so good,” she said in a voice little higher than a whisper. “The lives of fifty strong men in that couple of ounces of harmless looking fluid! If anyone could see me just now, I fancy they would take me rather for a witch or a poisoner of the fifteenth century than for a girl of the twenty-first.
“Well, my friend Alan, your mysterious power may kill more quickly, but not more surely than this; and this, too, will take a man out of the world so easily that not even he himself will know that he is going,—not even when he sinks into the sleep from which he will awake on the other side of the shadows.
“So much for the bodies of our enemies, and now for their souls! I don’t want to kill wholesale, at least, not just yet; and as for you, my Alan, you are far too splendid, too glorious a man to be killed, to say nothing of your being so much more useful alive. No, I have a very much pleasanter fate in store for you.”
Just then a little cloud as of incense smoke began to rise from the crucible in which were the mixed powders, and a faint, pleasant perfume began to diffuse itself. She stopped her soliloquy, measured off exactly half of the liquid, and patiently poured it, drop by drop, into the crucible, at the same time gradually increasing the heat.
The vapour gradually disappeared, and the perfume died away. When she had poured in the last drop, she began slowly stirring the mixture with a glass rod. It gradually assumed the consistency of thick syrup, and after stirring it for three minutes by her watch, which lay on the table beside her, she extinguished the electric lamp and waited.