With a childish canniness he held the bottle so that she could see the skull and cross-bones and the word beneath. Marie Louise, not realizing that they had already set out on the adventure, gave a stifled cry and snatched at the bottle. It fell to the floor with a crash, and the tablets leaped here and there like tiny white beetles. Some of them ran out into the room and caught Verrinder's eye. Before he could reach the door Sir Joseph had said, triumphantly, to Marie Louise: "Mamma and I did eat already. Too bad you do not come vit. _Adé, Töchterchen. Lebewohl!_" He was reaching his awkward arms out to clasp her when Verrinder burst into the homely scene of their tragedy. He caught up the broken bottle and saw the word "_Poison_." Beneath were the directions, but no word of description, no mention of the antidote. "What is this stuff?" Verrinder demanded, in a frenzy of dread and wrath and self-reproach. "I don't know," Marie Louise stammered. Verrinder repeated his demand of Sir Joseph. "_Weiss nit_," he mumbled, beginning to stagger as the serpent struck its fangs into his vitals. Verrinder ran out into the hall and shouted down the stairs: "Bickford, telephone for a doctor, in God's name--the nearest one. Send out to the nearest chemist and fetch him on the run--with every antidote he has. Send somebody down to the kitchen for warm water, mustard, coffee." There was a panic below, but Marie Louise knew nothing except the swirling tempest of her own horror. Sir Joseph and Lady Webling, blind with torment, wrung and wrenched with spasms of destruction, groped for each other's hands and felt their way through clouds of fire to a resting-place. Marie Louise could give them no help, but a little guidance toward the bed. They fell upon it--and after a hideous while they died. CHAPTER VI The physician arrived too late--physicians were hard to get for civilians. While he was being hunted down and brought in, Verrinder fought an unknown poison with what antidotes he could improvise, and saw that they merely added annoyance to agony. His own failure had been unnerving. He had pursued this eminent couple for months, trying in vain to confirm suspicion by proof and strengthen assurance with evidence, and always delaying the blow in the hope of gathering in still more of Germany's agents. At last he had thrown the slowly woven net about the Weblings and revealed them to themselves as prisoners of his cunning. Then their souls slipped out through the meshes, leaving their useless empty bodies in his care, their bodies and the soul and body of the young woman who was involved in their guilt. Verrinder did not relish the story the papers would make of it. So he and the physician devised a statement for the press to the effect that the Weblings died of something they had eaten. The stomach of Europe was all deranged, and Sir Joseph had been famous for his dinners; there was a kind of ironic logic in his epitaph.