"Well," said the Doctor, after a moment's pause and a still closer inspection, "you will give me no particulars, and so I shall give _you_ none. I suppose the main fact is what you want to know. The substance is a little dried, and consequently it has lost some of its aroma. But my impression is that it is a very powerful vegetable poison, compounded from certain simples that grow along running streams in the tropics, and especially in some of the West Indies." "I thought so!" said Joe, almost involuntarily, and an unmistakeable gleam of pleasure lighting up her face. "But would that poison produce any effect if applied outwardly?" "I should think so," replied the Doctor, "though, as you say, I hate chemistry. I should think that substance, applied to any vital part of the body, and kept there continuously, would produce racking pains and weakness, and be very likely to result in a disease resembling inflammatory rheumatism, or possibly paralysis, and death." "Thank you--thank you a dozen times," said Joe, springing up and grasping the Doctor very warmly by the hand. "You do not know how much good you may be doing by this examination; but you _shall_ know, sometime--I will tell you all about it. And now good-night!" rolling up the package and putting it back into her pocket. "My time is up, Mother will be worried about me, and I have a borrowed carriage waiting at the corner." "Allow me to see you to it," said the Doctor, rising with quick courtesy. "No farther than the gate, for the world," said the young girl. "For certain reasons, which you shall know some time, I must not be seen in your company to-night, even by the coachman." She tripped away instantly, the Doctor accompanying her to the gate,--and rolled away homeward at once. What a day that had been to her! And in what a whirl was her brain when she reflected on all she had discovered and tried to arrange in her own mind the details of what she yet felt it necessary to do! It was within forty-eight hours after, and when her mind had not become at all calmed from the thoughts of the crime surrounding her and those she loved, that the visit to the sorceress was made, as before recorded. How much of additional information she may really have expected to gain from the sorceress, it is impossible to say,--or whether this matter of the attempted poisoning was really the matter which sent her to that questionable fountain of intelligence; but it is not at all strange that she should have blended the terrors of the real and the imaginary together, and been powerfully impressed by the events of that day which marked so important an era in her existence.