What mattered all her vigilance and caution?
Vainly glide from the fangs of the serpent,--his very breath suffices to destroy! Pure seems the draught and wholesome the viand,--that master of the science of murder needs not the means of the bungler! Then, keen and strong from the creeping lethargy started the fierce instinct of self and the ruthless impulse of revenge.

Not too late yet to escape; for those subtle banes, that are to defy all detection, work but slowly to their end.
One evening a woman, closely mantled, stood at watch by the angle of a wall.

The light came dim and muffled from the window of a cafe hard at hand; the reflection slept amidst the shadows on the dark pavement, and save a solitary lamp swung at distance in the vista over the centre of the narrow street, no ray broke the gloom.

The night was clouded and starless, the wind moaned in gusts, and the rain fell heavily; but the gloom and the loneliness did not appall the eye, and the wind did not chill the heart, and the rain fell unheeded on the head of the woman at her post.

At times she paused in her slow, sentry-like pace to and fro, to look through the window of the cafe, and her gaze fell always on one figure seated apart from the rest.