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Rh more for Rannie, to make up for the debt I owed him, and there was plenty of time. I waited, watching the money pile up, watching the other children near the age when they could demand theirs; and at last the hour struck.

"How I planned and studied and worked! Christine I hated most, so I took her first. I listened to Rannie when he told me about the dear little things, smaller than the eye could see, which he kept in the box, and which some day would do my bidding! I dipped the pretty needle in among them one morning, and then watched her as she drew it in and out of her embroidery, waiting until it entered her flesh; for she was clumsy, my beautiful sister, as clumsy as she was stupid. I was my father's own clever daughter, though they called him 'crazy.' I was crazy, too, but nobody ever knew it; nobody even guessed; for I watched myself always, always!

"She pierced her finger with the needle, and I could have screamed aloud with joy, only that they would have known, and my work had only just begun. They thought I loved her; they let me stay beside her bed, and over and over again I infected her with a pin dipped in Rannie's tube. She thought at first it was accidental, when I lifted her in bed; but later she suspected the truth. I saw it in her eyes, although those fools of doctors never knew."

Richard Lorne raised his clenched hands above his head and shook them impotently, but the woman did not appear to see. At a motion from Odell her two guards had forced her into a chair; and now she crouched there, mouthing and grimacing in hideous triumph.

"The night she died I crept up to father's room and hid the needle in the folds of the couch on which he spent so