"Nightshade! The belladonna!" she was saying to herself as she ran. "I know the phial; I know its place. O, God, give me time, and give me wit, and do Thou the rest!" Past power to explain, she swept aside with a vehement arm the woman who found needed shelter for herself in Doctor Fuller's house, and kept it for him till his wife should come to Plymouth.
Into the crude laboratory and pharmacy—in which the doctor had allowed her to work with him, of the contents of which he had taught her so much for an emergency that she had little dreamed would so closely affect herself when it came—Constance flew, and turned to the shelf where stood, in their dark phials, the few poisons which the doctor kept ready to do beneficent work for him.
"Belladonna, belladonna, the beautiful lady," Constance murmured, in the curious way that minds have of seizing words and dwelling on them with surface insistence, while the actual mind is intensely working on a vital matter.
She took down the wrong phial first, and set it back impatiently.
"There should be none other like belladonna," she said aloud, and took down the phial she sought. To be sure that she was right, though it was labelled in the doctor's almost illegible small writing, she withdrew the cork. She knew the sickening odour of the nightshade which she had helped distil, an odour that dimly recalled a tobacco that had come to her father in England in her childhood from some Spanish colony, as she had been told, and also a wine that her stepmother made from wild berries.
Constance shuddered as she replaced the cork.
"It sickens me, but if only it will restore little Damaris!" she thought.
Holding the phial tight Constance hastened away, and, her breath still coming painfully, she broke into her swift race homeward, diminishing nothing of her speed in coming, her great purpose conquering the pain that oppressed her labouring breast.
When she reached her home her father was watching for her in the doorway. He took her hands in both of his without a word, covering the phial which she clasped, and looking at her questioningly.
"I hope so; oh, I hope so, Father!" she said. "The doctor told me."