“Now it’s done, it can’t be undone,” he said. “But is it so very safe, after all? The stuff is not beyond analysis, unluckily; but it’s much more hard to detect this way, mixed with the orange-juice, than any other way. And then there’s all the horrid fuss afterward. Even if there is not an inquest--as, of course, there won’t be--they’ll ask who the girl is, what the devil she was doing here. Perhaps they’ll, some of them, recognize Alice: she has been too much before the public, confound her. It may not be very hard to lie through all these inquiries, perhaps.” And then he looked mechanically at his cold fingers, and bit his thumb-nail, and yawned. “By gad! I wish I had not risked it,” he said to himself; and his complexion was now of a curious faint blue, and his heart began to flutter painfully in a manner not strange in his experience. He sunk back in his chair, with his hands all thrilling and pricking to the finger-tips. He took a large silver flask from his pocket, but he could scarcely unscrew the stopper, and had to manage it with his teeth. A long pull at the liquor restored him, and he began his round of reflections again. “That French fellow who tried it this way in Scotland was found out,” he said; “and--” He did not like, even in his mind, to add that the “French fellow, consequently, suffered the extreme penalty of the law. But then he was a fool, and boasted beforehand, and bungled it infernally. Still, it’s not absolutely safe: the other plan I thought of first was better. By gad! I wish I could be sure she had not taken the stuff. Perhaps she hasn’t. Anyway, she must be asleep again now; and, besides, there are the other oranges to be substituted for those left in the room, if she _has_ taken it. I _must_ go and see. I don’t like the job.” He filled his pockets with five unpoisoned oranges, and the skin of a sixth, and so crept upstairs. His situation was, perhaps, rather novel. With murder in his remorseless heart, he yet hoped against hope, out of his very poltroonery, that murder had not been done. At the girl’s door he waited and listened, his face horribly agitated and shining wet. All was silent. His heart was sounding hoarsely within him, like a dry pump: he heard it, so noisy and so distinct that he almost feared it might wake the sleeper. If only, after all, she had not touched the fruit!