‘I don’t think our neighbours hereabouts are renowned for their early habits,’ answered Lucius, unabashed by this reproof. ‘If you find people are gone to bed, you can bring the medicines home, and take them out again early to-morrow morning. You needn’t go on knocking and ringing if you don’t get answered quickly.’ ‘Very well, sir,’ murmured the boy with a yawn. ‘They’ll be up at all the publics of course: there’s the liniment for Mrs. Purdew’s sprained wrist, and the lotion for Mr. Tweaker’s black eye; and they’ll be up at the butcher’s, and at the general round the corner, where the children’s down with measles, I daresay. But I expect to find the private gentlefolks gone to bed.’ ‘Give me that rhubarb, and hold your tongue,’ said Lucius. His medicines were soon made up and dispatched; and he was on the point of leaving his surgery for the night, when he put his hand in his pocket in search of a key, and found the bottle he had taken from Mr. Sivewright’s bedside. ‘Good heavens!’ he exclaimed; ‘are mind and memory failing me altogether that I could forget this?’ He held the bottle between him and the flame of the gas. The liquid, which had been clear enough when he sent it out of his surgery, had now a slightly clouded look. ‘I wonder whether I have such a thing as a bit of copper gauze?’ he thought, as he put down the bottle. He looked in several small drawers in the table on which he made up his medicines, and finally found the object he sought for. He poured the medicine into a glass vessel and applied his test. The experiment showed him that there was arsenic in the medicine. The quantity was of the smallest, but the poison was there. He repeated his experiment, to make assurance doubly sure. Yes, there could be no shadow of doubt. Arsenic had been introduced into the medicine since it had left his hands yesterday afternoon. Whose was the guilty hand which had done this thing? His vague suspicion arose before him all at once in the shape of an awful fact, and the horror of it almost paralysed thought. Who could have seemed more secure than this harmless old man, lying on his sick bed, tenderly watched by loving eyes, ministered to by dutiful hands—guarded, it would seem, from the possibility of danger? Yet even there a murderer had penetrated; and by slow steps, by means so gradual as almost to defy suspicion, that feeble life was assailed. Who could the assassin be but that old servant in whose fidelity Homer Sivewright trusted from the mere force of habit? Yes; the case seemed clear enough, looked at by the light of this new discovery. Jacob Wincher, who knew the full value of the collection, had begun a systematic course of plunder—who could tell how long it had gone on? perhaps ever since Mr. Sivewright had taken to his bed—and, in order to escape the detection which must have been inevitable on the old man’s recovery, he had taken measures to make his master’s illness mortal.