On the second charge, that of administering poison on the 22nd or 23rd of February, the following evidence was offered. On the 21st of February Miss Smith openly purchased an ounce and a half of arsenic of the chemist Murdoch, ostensibly for the purpose—a false one, as the evidence proved—of killing rats at her father’s country house. It was mixed with soot, of which she some days afterwards spoke to the chemist, saying she thought arsenic was white. If, therefore, the lovers met on the 22nd, or 23rd, she had poison in her possession. Whether L’Angelier went out on the night of the 22nd, his landlady could not say:[114] she did not hear him come in, but, when she went into his room early the next morning, she found him suffering from his second attack of illness for which Dr. Thomson attended him, and from which he recovered in about eight days. That the symptoms were those of arsenical poisoning was hardly to be doubted, and though Dr. Thomson at the time attributed them to billious derangement, he said, that, “had he known that L’Angelier had taken an irritant poison, those were the symptoms he should expect to follow.” The evidence that the lovers had met on the night of the 22nd, or morning of the 23rd, rested on a letter, which not only did not bear any date or day of the week, but the post-mark on which was so obliterated that the post-office official could not fix any date, though he thought he could see the “M” of March on the stamp, which counsel on both sides agreed in considering an error. In that letter Miss Smith wrote: “I am so sorry to hear you are ill. I hope to God you will soon be better—-- you did look bad on Sunday night and Monday morning. I think you got sick with walking home so late, and the long want of food; so, next time we meet, I shall make you eat a loaf of bread before you go.” This letter the Lord Advocate assumed to be written on Wednesday, the 25th of February, and to refer to the meeting on the night of the 22nd and morning of the 23rd. To Miss Perry, on the 9th of March, L’Angelier spoke of having had a cup of coffee and chocolate from Miss Smith, which Miss Perry understood to refer to two occasions, and added, “I can’t think why I was so unwell after getting that coffee and chocolate from her.” “It ought not to be forgotten,” said the Lord Justice Clerk, “that the contents of the stomach on these two illnesses had not been examined, and therefore it was merely an inference that they were caused by arsenic—an inference drawn from the fact that on the 22nd of March he died from that poison.” With reference to the purchase of arsenic, the learned Judge added: “He attached little importance to the statements of the druggists as to what was said by the prisoner about rats; without stating some such objects she would not have got it at all; and it was not to be supposed, if she had wanted it as a cosmetic, that she would tell the druggist. Did she see the deceased on the Sunday night,