She did not observe as she closed the gate that a gentleman had run down the steps of her home and walked briskly to the corner, waiting there for an electric car.
It was a quiet street and seemingly deserted this cold March night, so that he observed with surprise the slender, graceful figure flitting before him, noting with a start that it looked like Miss Van Lew.
She darted into the drug store, and curiosity made him draw near the door to satisfy his doubts.
He heard the sweet musical voice, to whose tender songs he had listened in rapture every day, asking in hoarse, unnatural accents for morphine, and then the answer of the clerk who said that he could not sell such a dangerous drug without a doctor’s prescription.
Viola turned silently and went out into the street, passing Rolfe Maxwell without perceiving him, in the absorption of her misery.
She stood a moment watching the electric car now bearing swiftly down toward the corner, and the young man thought as she advanced into the street, that she was about to signal it.
He said to himself in perplexity:
“What a strange freak for Miss Van Lew, boarding an electric car at ten o’clock at night to go after morphine! Yet there is no one sick at her house, as I am aware.”
Perplexed and uneasy, he moved forward after her and just then a terrible thing happened.
Viola, mad with misery, and assailed by an irresistible temptation, threw herself recklessly across the track, where the advancing wheels of the car would in another moment crush out her life.