"
"I shall wait in my bedroom--just as I did before. I shall keep the door
a little way open. It was a little way open last year. I will watch the
sitting-room door; and the moment it moves, I will blow out my light. It
all happened in that way, on my birthday night. And it must all happen
again in the same way, musn't it?"
"Are you sure you can control yourself, Miss Verinder?"
"In HIS interests, I can do anything!" she answered fervently.
One look at her face told me that I could trust her. I addressed myself
again to Mr. Bruff.
"I must trouble you to put your papers aside for a moment," I said.
"Oh, certainly!" He got up with a start--as if I had disturbed him at a
particularly interesting place--and followed me to the medicine-chest.
There, deprived of the breathless excitement incidental to the practice
of his profession, he looked at Betteredge--and yawned wearily.
Miss Verinder joined me with a glass jug of cold water, which she had
taken from a side-table. "Let me pour out the water," she whispered. "I
must have a hand in it!"
I measured out the forty minims from the bottle, and poured the laudanum
into a medicine glass.
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