died so strangely haunted him all through the inquest. As he noted
down what the doctor dictated to him he moved his eyebrows gloomily
and rubbed his forehead.

"And are there really poisons that kill one in a quarter of an hour,
gradually, without any pain?" he asked the doctor while the latter
was opening the skull.

"Yes, there are. Morphia for instance."

"H'm, strange. I remember she used to keep something of the sort
. . . . But it could hardly be."

On the way back the examining magistrate looked exhausted, he kept
nervously biting his moustache, and was unwilling to talk.

"Let us go a little way on foot," he said to the doctor. "I am tired
of sitting."

After walking about a hundred paces, the examining magistrate seemed
to the doctor to be overcome with fatigue, as though he had been
climbing up a high mountain. He stopped and, looking at the doctor
with a strange look in his eyes, as though he were drunk, said:

"My God, if your theory is correct, why it's. . . it was cruel,
inhuman! She poisoned herself to punish some one else! Why, was the
sin so great? Oh, my God! And why did you make me a present of this
damnable idea, doctor!"

The examining magistrate clutched at his head in despair, and went