Determined at once to satisfy himself of the truth, Mr. Blandy rose and went downstairs to breakfast.  There was present at that meal, besides himself and Mary, one Robert Littleton, his clerk, who had returned the night before from a holiday in Warwickshire.  The old man appeared to him “in great agony, and complained very much.”  Mary handed her father his tea in his “particular dish.”  He tasted it, and, fixing his eyes upon her, remarked that it had a bad, gritty taste, and asked if she had put anything into it.  The girl trembled and changed countenance, muttering that it was made as usual; to hide her confusion she hurried from the room.  Mr. Blandy poured his tea into “the cat’s basin” and sent for a fresh supply.  After breakfast, Mary asked Littleton what had become of the tea, and, being told, seemed to him much upset by the occurrence.  When the old man had finished his meal, he went into the kitchen to shave.  While there he observed to his daughter, in presence of Betty Binfield, “I had like to have been poisoned once,” referring to an occasion when he and two friends drank something hurtful at the coffee house.  “One of these gentlemen died immediately, the other is dead now,” said he; “I have survived them both, and it is my fortune to be poisoned at last,” and, looking “very hard” at her, he turned away.

Miss Blandy must have been blind indeed had she failed to see the significance of these incidents.  Anything but obtuse, she at once decided to take instant measures for her own protection.  She went up to her room, and collecting Cranstoun’s correspondence and what remained of the fatal powder, she returned to the kitchen; standing before the fire on pretence of drying the superscription of a letter, she threw the whole bundle into the grate and “stirred it down with a stick.”  The cook at the moment, whether by chance or design, put on some coals, which preserved the papers from flaming up, and as soon as their mistress had left the kitchen, the maids, now thoroughly on the alert, took off the coal.  The letters were consumed, but they drew out almost uninjured a folded paper packet, bearing in Cranstoun’s hand the suggestive words, “The powder to clean the pebbles with,” and still containing a small quantity of white powder, which they delivered to Mr. Norton when he called later in the day.  The apothecary found his patient worse, and stated his opinion to Mary, who asked him to bring from Reading the great Dr. Anthony Addington (father of Lord Sidmouth).  Did she at the eleventh hour, pausing upon her dreadful path, seek yet to save her father’s life, or was this merely a move to show her “innocence,” as Dr. Pritchard, in similar circumstances, invited an eminent colleague to visit his dying victims?  Both in her Narrative and her Own Account Mary takes full credit for calling in Dr. Addington, but she is unable to allude to the episodes of the parlour and the kitchen.