Penny Blood Serial Fiction — page 59: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

eae REYNOLDS’ WORKS ° has a foul murder come to my knowledge. It is a murder perpetrated by means of a venom which I myself discovered and I also am made the discoverer of the awful tragedy it has produced. The finger of God is in all this; it is Heaven itself which is prompting me on to bring to justice the per- petrator of that crime. What, then, I ask, am I to do? This crime was committed under your roof. God forbid that I should attribute it to you. No, it were impossible. If you then be guiltless, will you not aid me in fixing upon the guilty one? ’’ “Oh, but all this is most dreadful,” murmured Lady Saxondale, still with clasped hands, still with appealing locks, still with ineffable anguish in every lineament of her pale © countenance. “‘ If an exposure be made, must I not confess that I purloined the phial of poison from your house? What will be thought of me? I shall be ruined. A lady who visits a single man stealthily, who is admitted by him into all the mysteries of his laboratory — Ah, Doctor Ferney, have mercy upon me — I beseech you to have mercy upon me! — or else take a dagger and plunge it into this bosom.” Lady Saxondale did not throw herself upon her knees as’ she thus spoke, but her anguish was truly unfeigned, — her inquietude was too great not to render her affliction genuine. As she sat by the physician’s side upon the sofa, she leaned toward him with an agony of appeal in her looks, her attitude, and her gestures, and as she gave utter- ance to the closing words of her well-nigh frenzied speech, she pressed her hands convulsively to that bosom for which she invoked the dagger as an alternative rather than an exposure. | ‘Oh, my God! what am I to do?’’ murmured the phy- sician, and half-averting his countenance, he raised one hand to his pale forehead. “ What am I to do?” “ What are you to do?” eried Lady Saxondale. ‘“ Bury the subject in oblivion.” “JT cannot —I dare not,’’ responded Ferney, shaking his head solemnly, but with a look of the deepest affliction. ‘Tf I conceal my knowledge of this crime, I become as it were an accessory to it, and how shall I ever satisfy my own conscience? But tell me, Lady Saxondale, do your suspicions fall upon any one in your household? Reflect, consider, to whom did you ever impart the secret of that subtle poison? Gomicbooks (E(0)