“I know there has been a mistake, and I know that I made it.”

“Tell me why.”

“It is very simple.  They sent up from Mr. Withey’s that last night for some Epsom salts in a great hurry.  I knew there must be some great need, so I rushed to the pantry.  Jacob wasn’t at home.  I reached to the top shelf and pulled down a bottle, one of those bottles.  In my hurry I didn’t look at the label, but poured the little white crystals out in a paper, and they took them away.  Then I put the bottle back in its place and went on with my work.  In the morning I heard Mr. Withey was dead.”

“But the arsenic—­the arsenic,” interposed the doctor.  “How did it get there?”

“Heaven knows; you remember Jacob used to get it once in a while to keep his horses in condition.  I presume he got a fresh bottle of it about the same time I got some more Epsom salts, and they were both put up there on the top shelf together.  It is all too plain.  I got the bottles mixed and opened the wrong one.”

“And so Jacob was innocent?”

“Yes, and I could have saved him if I had known in time.  Oh, Jacob, Jacob,” she moaned, compressing a world of remorse into the words.  “And it was my mistake—­my mistake!”

“Then Mrs. Withey is innocent, too,” said Doctor McMurray.  “Don’t you make it out so?”

Mrs. Trent looked up sharply.  It seemed as though she had for the moment forgotten her lesser trouble in the new consciousness of the greater.  The mention of the other woman’s name brought back all the profound sense of wrong which she knew she had suffered at her hands.

“Mrs. Withey—­innocent!” she gasped.

“Yes, she is innocent, and you have the power of saving her life.”

“Doctor McMurray, that woman robbed me of my husband—­both of his love and of his memory.”  Mrs. Trent was in deadly earnest.

“But—­she is innocent, and you can save her from a wretch’s death,” the old man repeated.

“Save her—­her, who stands in my mind for all that I ought to hate?”

“Mrs. Trent,” Doctor McMurray said in a low voice, “you ought to hate no-one, not even if he uses you as Mrs. Withey has used you.  If we keep on hating the clouds will never lift.”

Mrs. Trent rose heavily from her chair and labored from her window that she might look out across the valley toward the Peak.  Her voice was hoarse as she answered: 

“Oh, I’m afraid the clouds will never lift.  The hatred of that woman is like a fog which closes in upon my soul, and shuts off every beam of sunshine.  I can’t see through it, and the heaviness of it chokes me.  The clouds will never lift.”

The old minister came up beside her, and stood looking for a time out toward the Peak.  The mist which all day had hung so low around the foot of the hills had risen appreciably, and now the Cleft itself was beginning to clear, revealing the dark base of the Peak itself.  A single ray of sunshine shot out of the west and struck straight into the Cleft.