“Have confidence in me,” she answered.  “I want to succeed—­I am prudent.”

“But you may be suspected.”

“By whom?”

“Eh!  How do I know?  Everyone—­the servants, the doctor.”

“No danger.  And suppose they did suspect?”

“They would make examinations, Bertha; they would make a minute scrutiny.”

She gave a smile of the most perfect security.

“They might examine and experiment as much as they pleased, they would find nothing.  Do you think I am such a fool as to use arsenic?”

“For Heaven’s sake, hush!”

“I have procured one of those poisons which are as yet unknown, and which defy all analysis; one of which many doctors—­and learned ones, too—­could not even tell the symptoms!”

“But where did you get this—­this—­”

He dared not say, “poison.”

“Who gave you that?” resumed he.

“What matters it?  I have taken care that he who gave it to me should run the same danger as myself, and he knows it.  There’s nothing to fear from that quarter.  I’ve paid him enough to smother all his regrets.”

An objection came to his lips; he wanted to say, “It’s too slow;” but he had not the courage, though she read his thought in his eyes.

“It is slow, because that suits me,” said she.  “Before all, I must know about the will—­and that I am trying to find out.”

She occupied herself constantly about this will, and during the long hours that she passed at Sauvresy’s bedside, she gradually, with the greatest craft and delicacy, led her husband’s mind in the direction of his last testament, with such success that he himself mentioned the subject which so absorbed Bertha.

He said that he did not comprehend why people did not always have their worldly affairs in order, and their wishes fully written down, in case of accident.  What difference did it make whether one were ill or well?  At these words Bertha attempted to stop him.  Such ideas, she said, pained her too much.  She even shed real tears, which fell down her cheeks and made her more beautiful and irresistible than before; real tears which moistened her handkerchief.

“You dear silly creature,” said Sauvresy, “do you think that makes one die?”

“No; but I do not wish it.”

“But, dear, have we been any the less happy because, on the day after our marriage, I made a will bequeathing you all my fortune?  And, stop; you have a copy of it, haven’t you?  If you were kind, you would go and fetch it for me.”

She became very red, then very pale.  Why did he ask for this copy?  Did he want to tear it up?  A sudden thought reassured her; people do not tear up a document which can be cancelled by a scratch of the pen on another sheet of paper.  Still, she hesitated a moment.

“I don’t know where it can be.”

“But I do.  It is in the left-hand drawer of the glass cupboard; come, please me by getting it.”