Her hair, her hands, her face were all spotted with crimson streaks, and she shuddered like one in an ague chill as she washed the stains away. Her task accomplished, she threw on a wrapper and lay shudderingly down to rest on a couch, thinking with alarm of the morrow, when the bloody corpse of her victim should be discovered on the floor of the little room. What a sensation there would be! How would she be able to act her part of surprise and innocence? How could she bear to look upon the dumb, accusing face of that poor dead girl? “If I could only hide the body there would not be half so much sensation, and we should avoid the horrors of a funeral!” flashed over her excited mind. She sat racking her brains for some means of getting the corpse out of the room. All at once it came to her clearly. Out among the shrubberies, not so far from the house, was an old, unused well that had been boarded over for years. The water was strongly impregnated with sulfur and iron, and very unpleasant to the taste, so it had been abandoned for good, because there was a cool spring of the same mineral waters on the place. “If I could tumble Gipsy out of her window, and drag her to the old well and throw her in, no one would ever know what became of her body, it could not even be proved that a murder had been committed,” she thought, screwing up her courage to the dreadful task. Fortune had favored her already in permitting her to escape from the scene of her crime undetected, and now she must trust to her luck to aid her in accomplishing the rest of her work in secrecy. The moon was going down, she had that much in her favor if she chanced to meet any one in the grounds, but she did not fail to mask her face in a dark veil, after putting on a black rainy-day skirt and clumsy cape that made a good disguise. Then gliding like an evil spirit through the dark corridors of the silent house, she gained Gipsy’s room again, carrying with her a stout linen sheet to serve the purpose of a rope in dragging the body to the well. Silent and bleeding lay the unconscious form of Gipsy, and, locking the door against any possible intrusion, Lelia knelt down and shudderingly knotted the sheet rope-fashion about the girl’s slim waist. She was taller and larger than Gipsy, and it was easy then to get her body to the window and push it rudely over the sill to the ground two stories below. It fell with a dull thud upon some flower-beds beneath, and there was nothing more but to finish her work. Trembling, panting, half-crazed with fear of detection, Lelia hurried down-stairs, out into the odorous darkness of the summer night. Looking furtively about, she detected nothing living but herself, not even the dogs that usually guarded the grounds, for they were taking a midnight excursion to some neighboring farm.