With his hand still mechanically pointing at the table Noel Vanstone raised his head and looked up at Mrs. Lecount.

“I took it from the cupboard,” she said, answering the look.  “I took both bottles out together, not knowing which might be the bottle I wanted.  I am as much shocked, as much frightened, as you are.”

“Poison!” he said to himself, slowly.  “Poison locked up by my wife in the cupboard in her own room.”  He stopped, and looked at Mrs. Lecount once more.  “For me?” he asked, in a vacant, inquiring tone.

“We will not talk of it, sir, until your mind is more at ease,” said Mrs. Lecount.  “In the meantime, the danger that lies waiting in this bottle shall be instantly destroyed in your presence.”  She took out the cork, and threw the laudanum out of window, and the empty bottle after it.  “Let us try to forget this dreadful discovery for the present,” she resumed; “let us go downstairs at once.  All that I have now to say to you can be said in another room.”

She helped him to rise from the chair, and took his arm in her own.  “It is well for him; it is well for me,” she thought, as they went downstairs together, “that I came when I did.”

On crossing the passage, she stepped to the front door, where the carriage was waiting which had brought her from Dumfries, and instructed the coachman to put up his horses at the nearest inn, and to call again for her in two hours’ time.  This done, she accompanied Noel Vanstone into the sitting-room, stirred up the fire, and placed him before it comfortably in an easy-chair.  He sat for a few minutes, warming his hands feebly like an old man, and staring straight into the flame.  Then he spoke.

“When the woman came and threatened me in Vauxhall Walk,” he began, still staring into the fire, “you came back to the parlor after she was gone, and you told me—?” He stopped, shivered a little, and lost the thread of his recollections at that point.

“I told you, sir,” said Mrs. Lecount, “that the woman was, in my opinion, Miss Vanstone herself.  Don’t start, Mr. Noel!  Your wife is away, and I am here to take care of you.  Say to yourself, if you feel frightened, ‘Lecount is here; Lecount will take care of me.’  The truth must be told, sir, however hard to bear the truth may be.  Miss Magdalen Vanstone was the woman who came to you in disguise; and the woman who came to you in disguise is the woman you have married.  The conspiracy which she threatened you with in London is the conspiracy which has made her your wife.  That is the plain truth.  You have seen the dress upstairs.  If that dress had been no longer in existence, I should still have had my proofs to convince you.  Thanks to my interview with Mrs. Bygrave I have discovered the house your wife lodged at in London; it was opposite our house in Vauxhall Walk.  I have laid my hand on one of the landlady’s daughters, who watched your wife from an inner room, and saw her put on the disguise;