She had found the actress reading a newspaper, and when Kennedy questioned her she remembered seeing a note lying on the dresser.  “Agnes,” Miss Blaisdell had said, “will you go into the writing-room and bring me some paper, a pen, and ink?  I don’t want to go in there this way.  There’s a dear good girl.”  Agnes had gone, though it was decidedly no part of her duty as one of the highest paid employes of the Novella.  But they all envied the popular actress, and were ready to do anything for her.  The next thing she remembered was finishing the coiffure she was working on and going to Miss Blaisdell.  There lay the beautiful actress.  The light in the corridor had not been lighted yet, and it was dark.  Her lips and mouth seemed literally to shine.  Agnes called her, but she did not move; she touched her, but she was cold.  Then she screamed and fled.  That was the last she remembered.

“The little writing-room,” reasoned Kennedy as we left the poor little hair-dresser quite exhausted by her narrative, “was next to the sanctum of Millefleur, where they found that bottle of ether phosphore and the oil of turpentine.  Some one who knew of that note or perhaps wrote it must have reasoned that an answer would be written immediately.  That person figured that the note would be the next thing written and that the top envelope of the pile would be used.  That person knew of the deadly qualities of too much phosphorised ether, and painted the gummed flap of the envelope with several grains of it.  The reasoning held good, for Agnes took the top envelope with its poisoned flap to Miss Blaisdell.  No, there was no chance about that.  It was all clever, quick reasoning.”

“But,” I objected, “how about the oil of turpentine?”

“Simply to remove the traces of the poison.  I think you will see why that was attempted before we get through.”

Kennedy would say no more, but I was content because I could see that he was now ready to put his theories, whatever they were, to the final test.  He spent the rest of the day working at the hospital with Dr. Barron, adjusting a very delicate piece of apparatus down in a special room, in the basement.  I saw it, but I had no idea what it was or what its use might be.

Close to the wall was a stereopticon which shot a beam of light through a tube to which I heard them refer as a galvanometer, about three feet distant.  In front of this beam whirled a five-spindled wheel, governed by a chronometer which erred only a second a day.  Between the poles of the galvanometer was stretched a slender thread of fused quartz plated with silver, only one one-thousandth of a millimetre in diameter, so tenuous that it could not be seen except in a bright light.  It was a thread so slender that it might have been spun by a miscroscopic spider.