She went straight to the place where the laudanum was hidden, and took it out.  The bottle was so small that it lay easily in the palm of her hand.  She let it remain there for a little while, and stood looking at it.

“DEATH!” she said.  “In this drop of brown drink—­DEATH!”

As the words passed her lips, an agony of unutterable horror seized on her in an instant.  She crossed the room unsteadily, with a maddening confusion in her head, with a suffocating anguish at her heart.  She caught at the table to support herself.  The faint clink of the bottle, as it fell harmlessly from her loosened grasp and rolled against some porcelain object on the table, struck through her brain like the stroke of a knife.  The sound of her own voice, sunk to a whisper—­her voice only uttering that one word, Death—­rushed in her ears like the rushing of a wind.  She dragged herself to the bedside, and rested her head against it, sitting on the floor.  “Oh, my life! my life!” she thought; “what is my life worth, that I cling to it like this?”

An interval passed, and she felt her strength returning.  She raised herself on her knees and hid her face on the bed.  She tried to pray—­to pray to be forgiven for seeking the refuge of death.  Frantic words burst from her lips—­words which would have risen to cries, if she had not stifled them in the bed-clothes.  She started to her feet; despair strengthened her with a headlong fury against herself.  In one moment she was back at the table; in another, the poison was once more in her hand.

She removed the cork and lifted the bottle to her mouth.

At the first cold touch of the glass on her lips, her strong young life leaped up in her leaping blood, and fought with the whole frenzy of its loathing against the close terror of Death.  Every active power in the exuberant vital force that was in her rose in revolt against the destruction which her own will would fain have wreaked on her own life.  She paused:  for the second time, she paused in spite of herself.  There, in the glorious perfection of her youth and health—­there, trembling on the verge of human existence, she stood; with the kiss of the Destroyer close at her lips, and Nature, faithful to its sacred trust, fighting for the salvation of her to the last.

No word passed her lips.  Her cheeks flushed deep; her breath came thick and fast.  With the poison still in her hand, with the sense that she might faint in another moment, she made for the window, and threw back the curtain that covered it.

The new day had risen.  The broad gray dawn flowed in on her, over the quiet eastern sea.