He pointed to a little triangular cupboard of old worm-eaten walnut-wood fixed high in a corner of the room.  Mrs. Lecount tried the door:  it was locked.

As she made that discovery, she saw his head sink back gradually on the easy-chair in which she had placed him.  The warning of the doctors in past years—­“If you ever let him faint, you let him die”—­recurred to her memory as if it had been spoken the day before.  She looked at the cupboard again.  In a recess under it lay some ends of cord, placed there apparently for purposes of packing.  Without an instant’s hesitation, she snatched up a morsel of cord, tied one end fast round the knob of the cupboard door, and seizing the other end in both hands, pulled it suddenly with the exertion of her whole strength.  The rotten wood gave way, the cupboard doors flew open, and a heap of little trifles poured out noisily on the floor.  Without stopping to notice the broken china and glass at her feet, she looked into the dark recesses of the cupboard and saw the gleam of two glass bottles.  One was put away at the extreme back of the shelf, the other was a little in advance, almost hiding it.  She snatched them both out at once, and took them, one in each hand, to the window, where she could read their labels in the clearer light.

The bottle in her right hand was the first bottle she looked at.  It was marked—­Sal-volatile.

She instantly laid the other bottle aside on the table without looking at it.  The other bottle lay there, waiting its turn.  It held a dark liquid, and it was labeled—­POISON.

CHAPTER II.

MRS. LECOUNT mixed the sal-volatile with water, and administered it immediately.  The stimulant had its effect.  In a few minutes Noel Vanstone was able to raise himself in the chair without assistance; his color changed again for the better, and his breath came and went more freely.

“How do you feel now, sir?” asked Mrs. Lecount.  “Are you warm again on your left side?”

He paid no attention to that inquiry; his eyes, wandering about the room, turned by chance toward the table.  To Mrs. Lecount’s surprise, instead of answering her, he bent forward in his chair, and looked with staring eyes and pointing hand at the second bottle which she had taken from the cupboard, and which she had hastily laid aside without paying attention to it.  Seeing that some new alarm possessed him, she advanced to the table, and looked where he looked.  The labeled side of the bottle was full in view; and there, in the plain handwriting of the chemist at Aldborough, was the one startling word confronting them both—­“Poison.”

Even Mrs. Lecount’s self-possession was shaken by that discovery.  She was not prepared to see her own darkest forebodings—­the unacknowledged offspring of her hatred for Magdalen—­realized as she saw them realized now.  The suicide-despair in which the poison had been procured; the suicide-purpose for which, in distrust of the future, the poison had been kept, had brought with them their own retribution.  There the bottle lay, in Magdalen’s absence, a false witness of treason which had never entered her mind—­treason against her husband’s life!