"A punishment for having dared to drug poor unfortunate Victor," she told herself, as Julie, after administering tea, left her alone in the darkened room. She could almost pity Victor Mercier, now that she had circumvented him by stealing those incriminating documents, and thereby, if not entirely destroying, certainly weakening, his hold upon her. "His headache, if he has one, as I expect he has--he looked awfully ill lying there under morphia--can hardly be worse than mine," she mused. It was a long, weary day of pain. Towards evening, however, her suffering abated. "I will get up, Julie!" she said, when her faithful attendant came in on tiptoe for about the twentieth time. "But I will not go down. I will have some tea up here. Yes; you may bring me a little chicken--I think I could eat that. And--Julie--let me see--yes--one or two of the evening papers." As the dull weight had lifted from her weary head, she had begun to think again--and the dominating as well as tormenting misgiving she had felt on the subject of her escapade of the previous evening was anent that bottle with drugged brandy in it, which, wrapped in brown paper, she had left in the darkened entry of a house situated in some street the other side of Trafalgar Square. "I wonder who found it?" she uneasily asked herself. What would the finder think of his or her discovery? Would he or she be sufficiently idiotic to partake of the contents--and if he or she did? She shuddered. "No one would!" was her mental comment. She consoled herself with memories of the extraordinary accounts she had read of narcotic-consumers. Still, of course, those had been the _habitués_, who had gradually become accustomed to the drugs. Why, oh, why had she not thought of pouring away the wretched stuff before she threw away the bottle? It would then have been empty and harmless. She was interrupted in her self-reproach by the entrance of her maid with the tea-tray and the evening papers. "Mademoiselle must really eat some-ting," said Julie, coaxingly, as she arranged the enticing tray on the table at her mistress’ elbow--Joan was lying back wearily in a big easy chair. "The chicken is delicious, I can assure mademoiselle--I saw it cut myself--and the tea--just as mademoiselle likes it!" She poured out the tea and prattled on. As Joan was just languidly uncovering the chicken, hardly giving any attention to the girl’s flow of talk--she was speaking of the actress she had seen perform the night Joan first met Victor in the Regent’s Park--a certain word half startled her from her reverie--the word "suicide." Then, in her strung-up, nervous state, with that bottle on her mind, she was at once on the alert. "Who? What suicide?" she sharply asked. "Not the girl you saw act, and liked so much?"