Gretchen should take it; it could be placed in the basin of water in which she was wont to bathe her face each morning, and it would enter the body through the pores of the skin. In this way the doctors would be completely baffled, for they would not be able to trace the poison.
She put this dastardly plot into execution, and her cruel heart did not upbraid her, though she saw the girl droop and fade daily before her eyes.
When she looked out of her window and saw Gretchen and her lover pacing up and down the primrose path in the moonlight, a horrible laugh would break from the great lady's ripe, red lips.
"There will be but a few more of these meetings, tender partings and kisses under the larch-tree boughs."
She had never dreamed, this false, cruel beauty, that a man's heart could be constant to a dead love and spurn a living one.
All these years she had lived to rue it; but neither prayers, nor suffering, nor pangs of conscience could atone for the terrible crime committed.
During all the years that had passed since Gretchen had been lying in that lonely grave, she had never known one moment's peace of mind, until this hour when she lay dying and had confessed all.
Slowly, twice, thrice, Nadine Holt read the story through, and as she read, a terrible thought came into her own mind.
Why could not she procure this same drug and administer it in the same way to Jessie Staples?
She took the paper up to her room and hid it very carefully in her satchel.