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outward a little and then settled back into place.
    Ludmilla Abbott at sixty-five was, in a curious way, childish. Her plump face showed lines, but they were placid, smiling lines. Her china-blue eyes were candid and guileless.
    In spite of the years between, she was remarkably like a picture of herself at twenty—plump and fair and smiling, with a basket of highly artificial roses beside her—that hung in the formal drawing room downstairs. But, then, her life had been singularly uneventful.
    She had painted water colors and china; she had embroidered and could still play “The Scarf Dance” in a very spritely way on the old square piano. For years she had kept up all the family correspondence. She had never married and had devoted herself to Search and Diana, both orphaned, and (after her older brother John Abbott married Isabel Bohan) she had taken Richard, too, under her wing. They all had loved her dearly and, in an odd way, had humored her—her childishness, her occasionally sharp little tongue, her loving but (still) fussy small air of authority.
    But Search said now: “Dear, that—that isn’t possible! You mustn’t imagine—”
    Swiftly and rather horribly she thought of something—what was it called?—persecution mania?
    Ludmilla shook her head.
    “It isn’t imagination. It happened three times. The first time I didn’t know; I was just sick; I thought I’d eaten something. The second time it—it puzzled me. I had the old doctor’s book; you know; I brought you children up on it. So I got it out and read it. And I had symptoms of arsenic poisoning. But then I got better. I decided I was wrong. I had to be wrong—I thought then. But if it happened again, I was going to call a doctor—somebody from the city. And it—it did happen again and I did call a doctor from Chicago and he called another in consultation. And—you can see for your self—” She gave Search’s hands a kind of pat as if Search mustn’t mind too much and rose and went to a bird’s-eye maple desk across the room. It was closed and locked; she reached for a key, hidden under a Dresden clock that stood upon it, unlocked the desk and dropped the lid. It revealed an interior bulging with papers, with blotters and pens and inkwells; probably Ludmilla had never thrown out anything in all her sixty-five years of life. But she was orderly too; she reached directly for an envelope, typewritten with a printed return address.
    “It’s here,” she said. “Read it—it’s the doctor’s report.”
    Search read the letter; doubting her eyes, she read it again. It stated simply and directly that Miss Abbott had had arsenic poisoning; their laboratory tests had proved it. It named the tests briefly and technically and the probable amount of arsenic she had “accidentally consumed.” It was really merely a laboratory report put into a letter. There was only one sentence which in any way indicated a certain doubt or alarm on the part of the doctor. “Inasmuch,” he wrote succinctly, “as another such attack might prove fatal, I feel it my duty to strongly advise you to take every precaution against a recurrence of accidental poisoning.”
    Accidental. He’d repeated it, as if to stress the fact that while, humanely, he had to warn his patient, still he was making it definite in black and white that he was accusing no one of attempted murder.
    Attempted murder!
    “But it isn’t possible!”
    “That’s what I thought. But you see—”
    “Have you told anyone?”
    Ludmilla shook her head.
    “No. I—I didn’t know what to do.”
    “Not even Diana?”
    “No. I wrote to you the day I got the doctor’s letter.”
    “But why—”
    Ludmilla replied gently: “Don’t you see, dear? They were here at the time. All of them. Calvin, Diana, Richard. Eve. And if someone’s really trying to poison me …”
    There was a long pause. Then Search said : “Servants …”
    Again Ludmilla shook her head. “They’re all new. The second