Amy’s room was next to mine; on the other side slept—­and soundly, too, I would wager—­her aunt.  Indeed, our rooms connected by a door, always locked and without a key, of course.  By a sudden impulse I took out my bunch of keys.  Fortune favored me; an old key, that of my room at College, not only fitted perfectly, but opened it as softly as one could wish, and the door itself never creaked.  Locking it again, I went into Amy’s room through the hall.  A low light was burning.  I looked about anxiously.  Would she find the necessary means at hand without arousing the household?  It must be.  Suicide must be quite apparent, and the instrument must be suggested by its presence, without any search.

Among the trinkets in the large tray on her bureau, lay a tiny dagger with a sheath.  I remembered the day Hilyard gave it to her.  The rainy day when we were all looking over his Eastern curiosities, and she had admired it, and he had insisted on her accepting it.  The handle was of carved jade, representing a lizard whose eyes were superb rubies, and a band of uncut rubies ran around the place where the little curved blade began.  Ah! that was it!  The very stones made one dream of drops of blood.  I laid it carelessly on the bureau, at the edge of the tray.  If she noticed its displacement, she would think the maid had been looking at it, and the very fact of her picking it up and laying it among her other trinkets would bring it to her thoughts when she awoke, with mind set on death. His poison, his dagger—­what fitness!  Heaven itself was helping me, and approving my ridding earth of this Lamia whose blood ran evil.

When I gave Amy the letter, she took it languidly, saying she would read it in her room; she was going to bed; the wine had made her drowsy; and the others, too, declaring themselves worn with the great heat of the day, we bade each other good-night, and the house was soon silent.

I undressed on going to my room, since, in case of certain events, it would be to my interest to appear to have just risen from bed, and I even lay down, wrapped in my dressing-gown, and put out my light.  I almost wondered that I felt no greater resentment and rage at Hilyard, yet my sense of justice precluded it.  As well blame the tree around which the poison vine creeps and clings.  I looked deeper than would the world, which doubtless, judging from the surface, would have condemned him rather than her, had all been known.  She of the Madonna face and the angel smile, anything but wronged?  Never!  The world would have acquitted her triumphantly had she committed all the sins of the Borgias.  For myself, alas!  I had heard her own lips condemn her, when, led by wanton recklessness, or the occult sense of sympathy, she had talked to her cousin this afternoon.  Hilyard?  Yes, it had chanced to be Hilyard, but she, and not he, was most to blame.  Hers was not a sin wept over and expiated by remorse and tears;