A moment’s hope, hope violent and fluctuating, hope that was nearly torture, and then came a dialogue, and with it the terrors of despair.

“Thank Heaven, Planard, you have come at last,” said the Count, taking him with both hands by the arm, and clinging to it and drawing him toward me. “See, look at him. It has all gone sweetly, sweetly, sweetly up to this. Shall I hold the candle for you?”

My friend d’Harmonville, Planard, whatever he was, came to me, pulling off his gloves, which he popped into his pocket.

“The candle, a little this way,” he said, and stooping over me he looked earnestly in my face. He touched my forehead, drew his hand across it, and then looked in my eyes for a time.

“Well, doctor, what do you think?” whispered the Count.

“How much did you give him?” said the Marquis, thus suddenly stunted down to a doctor.

“Seventy drops,” said the lady.

“In the hot coffee?”

“Yes; sixty in a hot cup of coffee and ten in the liqueur.”

Her voice, low and hard, seemed to me to tremble a little. It takes a long course of guilt to subjugate nature completely, and prevent those exterior signs of agitation that outlive all good.

The doctor, however, was treating me as coolly as he might a subject which he was about to place on the dissecting-table for a lecture.

He looked into my eyes again for awhile, took my wrist, and applied his fingers to the pulse.

“That action suspended,” he said to himself.

Then again he placed something, that for the moment I saw it looked like a piece of gold-beater’s leaf, to my lips, holding his head so far that his own breathing could not affect it.

“Yes,” he said in soliloquy, very low.

Then he plucked my shirt-breast open and applied the stethoscope, shifted it from point to point, listened with his ear to its end, as if for a very far-off sound, raised his head, and said, in like manner, softly to himself, “All appreciable action of the lungs has subsided.”

Then turning from the sound, as I conjectured, he said:

“Seventy drops, allowing ten for waste, ought to hold him fast for six hours and a half-that is ample. The experiment I tried in the carriage was only thirty drops, and showed a highly sensitive brain. It would not do to kill him, you know. You are certain you did not exceed seventy?”

“Perfectly,” said the lady.

“If he were to die the evaporation would be arrested, and foreign matter, some of it poisonous, would be found in the stomach, don’t you see? If you are doubtful, it would be well to use the stomach-pump.”

“Dearest Eugenie, be frank, be frank, do be frank,” urged the Count.

“I am not doubtful, I am certain,” she answered.

“How long ago, exactly? I told you to observe the time.”

“I did; the minute-hand was exactly there, under the point of............