This was only a precaution, and could do no harm.  Then she arranged the good and the bad in their little packages of five, each in a tiny india-rubber band, laying bad ones and good ones alternately.  When this was done, she put all the packages into the original paper, loosely opened, and laid them once more before her looking-glass, upon the toilet table.  Her large white hands were exceedingly skilful, and it would have needed sharp eyes to see that the papers of medicine had been tampered with.

After this, she cut a sheet of the writing-paper into four square pieces, and very neatly made out of three of them three very small open boxes, for moulds, each of the size of a large lump of sugar, and she set them up side by side in a row.  One was larger than the other two.

They had brought her powdered sugar, with the juice of a lemon in a glass and a decanter of water; she had said that if she were thirsty she would make herself a glass of lemonade in the night.  She had also a bottle of ordinary sticking gum.

She took the sugar and mixed a very little with some of the stuff she had pulverized, and with a few drops of the gum, till it was a stiff, hard paste, and with the end of the paper-knife she carefully filled the largest of her three moulds with it.  She was sure that it would be dry and hard by the next day, and it would have the size, the appearance, and somewhat the taste of a lump of sugar.

Then she halved the little heap of arsenic medicine as exactly as she could.  There were nine powders in all.  To produce the symptoms of poisoning in herself, she had taken four from her old supply, that evening.  Half of nine would be four and a half, and that would not be too much.  She mixed enough wet sugar and gum with each little pile to fill one of each of the smaller moulds, pressing the sticky mass firmly into the paper.

When all was finished, she carefully cleaned the marble top of the chest of drawers, and threw what little of the coarser powder remained into the ashes of the fire, in which a few coals still glowed.  The heat would consume the powder immediately.

Having done this, she set the three little moulds on the warm marble hearthstone to dry, took the remainder of the package of coarser powder, twisted the stiff paper closely, so that it should not open, took the stockings from the keyholes, and, candle in hand, left the room, locking the door softly behind her.  She made no noise as she traversed the dim rooms, in her felt slippers; but she avoided the yellow drawing-room and passed through a passage behind it.  Her nerves were singularly good, but since Bosio’s death she did not like to be alone in that room at night.  Bosio had been fond of dabbling in spiritism and such things, and they had often talked about the possibility of coming back after death, in that very room, promising each other that, if it were possible, the one who died first would try to communicate with the other.  Matilde turned aside from the room in which they had said those things to each other.