‘Rubbish,’ said Peters:  ’why all this unnecessary heat?  It was a mere flea-bite.  I felt that I needed it.’

‘He injected it with his own hand...’ remarked Clodagh.

She was now standing at the mantel-piece, having lifted the syringe-box from the night-table, taken from its velvet lining both the syringe and the vial containing the morphia tablets, and gone to the mantel-piece to melt one of the tablets in a little of the distilled water there.  Her back was turned upon us, and she was a long time.  I was standing; Peters in his arm-chair, smoking.  Clodagh then began to talk about a Charity Bazaar which she had visited that afternoon.

She was long, she was long.  The crazy thought passed through some dim region of my soul:  ‘Why is she so long?’

‘Ah, that was a pain!’ went Peters:  ’never mind the bazaar, aunt—­think of the morphia.’

Suddenly an irresistible impulse seized me—­to rush upon her, to dash syringe, tabloids, glass, and all, from her hands.  I must have obeyed it—­I was on the tip-top point of obeying—­my body already leant prone:  but at that instant a voice at the opened door behind me said: 

‘Well, how is everything?’

It was Wilson, the electrician, who stood there.  With lightning swiftness I remembered an under-look of mistrust which I had once seen on his face.  Oh, well, I would not, and could not!—­she was my love—­I stood like marble...

Clodagh went to meet Wilson with frank right hand, in the left being the fragile glass containing the injection.  My eyes were fastened on her face:  it was full of reassurance, of free innocence.  I said to myself:  ‘I must surely be mad!’

An ordinary chat began, while Clodagh turned up Peters’ sleeve, and, kneeling there, injected his fore-arm.  As she rose, laughing at something said by Wilson, the drug-glass dropped from her hand, and her heel, by an apparent accident, trod on it.  She put the syringe among a number of others on the mantel-piece.

‘Your friend has been naughty, Mr. Wilson,’ she said again with that same pout:  ‘he has been taking more atropine.’

‘Not really?’ said Wilson.

‘Let me alone, the whole of you,’ answered Peters:  ‘I ain’t a child.’

These were the last intelligible words he ever spoke.  He died shortly before 1 A.M.  He had been poisoned by a powerful dose of atropine.

From that moment to the moment when the Boreal bore me down the Thames, all the world was a mere tumbling nightmare to me, of which hardly any detail remains in my memory.  Only I remember the inquest, and how I was called upon to prove that Peters had himself injected himself with atropine.  This was corroborated by Wilson, and by Clodagh:  and the verdict was in accordance.

And in all that chaotic hurry of preparation, three other things only, but those with clear distinctness now, I remember.