" Amy
protested, "indeed she did not need it, she should be better to-morrow,"
with a languid glance from those clear eyes; but I ran up to my room,
and returned with the flask.
"Just my clumsiness," I said, ruefully looking at the flask, "I uncorked
it, to see if it were really all he said, and I've spilled nearly the
whole of it."
"Oh! come now, Lewis," laughed Hilyard, "Is that the best story you can
invent?"
I laughed too, as I brought a glass, and poured out all that remained.
Hilyard, I had managed, should hold the glass, and as I assumed to
examine the flask, he carried the wine to Amy. Not that I wished, in
case of future inquiries, to implicate him, but I felt a melodramatic
desire that he should give his poison to Amy with his own hand: the wish
to seethe the kid in its mother's milk.
I watched her slowly drain the glass, without one pang that I had given
her death to drink. I experienced an atrocious satisfaction in feeling
that no chance whim had deterred her from consuming it all. I took the
flask to my room again, saying that I had forgotten a letter from my
mother, which I wished Amy to read, as it contained a tender message for
her.
As I stood alone in my room a fear overcame me that I had been a
credulous fool. Suppose the whole story of the drug were a fabrication,
what a farce were this! Who ever heard of a poison with so strange an
effect? True, but who had ever heard of chloroform a century ago? Let it
go that he was a discoverer, and I the first to profit by it.
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