"That brings us back to the poison," McCarren continued, his
note-book out. "Just go over that again, will you?"

And Granice went over it again. It had all been so simple at the
time--and he had been so clever in covering up his traces! As
soon as he decided on poison he looked about for an acquaintance
who manufactured chemicals; and there was Jim Dawes, a Harvard
classmate, in the dyeing business--just the man. But at the last
moment it occurred to him that suspicion might turn toward so
obvious an opportunity, and he decided on a more tortuous course.
Another friend, Carrick Venn, a student of medicine whom
irremediable ill-health had kept from the practice of his
profession, amused his leisure with experiments in physics, for
the exercise of which he had set up a simple laboratory. Granice
had the habit of dropping in to smoke a cigar with him on Sunday
afternoons, and the friends generally sat in Venn's work-shop, at
the back of the old family house in Stuyvesant Square. Off this
work-shop was the cupboard of supplies, with its row of deadly
bottles. Carrick Venn was an original, a man of restless curious
tastes, and his place, on a Sunday, was often full of visitors: a
cheerful crowd of journalists, scribblers, painters,
experimenters in divers forms of expression. Coming and going
among so many, it was easy enough to pass unperceived; and one
afternoon Granice, arriving before Venn had returned home, found
himself alone in the work-shop, and quickly slipping into the
cupboard, transferred the drug to his pocket.

But that had happened ten years ago; and Venn, poor fellow, was
long since dead of his dragging ailment. His old father was
dead, too, the house in Stuyvesant Square had been turned into a