Chapter I: A Beautiful Face

“A phial of laudanum, please!”

The sleepy clerk on night duty at the drug store looked up with a start. He had not heard any one enter, but here stood a young girl by the counter, looking at him with large, sombre dark eyes, that shone wierdly out of a white, white face, framed in tresses of disordered golden hair--a face beautiful beyond all dreams of fancy but for its strange, marble pallor, and the anguished eyes out of which gleamed a desperate purpose, as she extended a snowy ungloved hand with a silver coin shining in the rosy palm, and repeated in a low, eager voice:

“A phial of laudanum, please.”

It was a wild wintry night in the great city, and there were none abroad except those whom necessity forced to be out. The air was full of keen, fine flakes of snow, that was frozen by the piercing wind even before it fell to the earth. The cold was intense.

“The wrathful winter hastening on apace,
With blustering blasts had all ybared the treen;
And old Saturnus with his frosty face,
With chilling cold had pierced the tender green.”

The hour was late, and all the shops were closed except the drug stores that stood open by night as well as by day, always at the service of the sick and suffering. Even these, with their great red and green lights glowing abroad like friendly beacons to those who were drifting on the perilous seas of sickness and disease, were mostly deserted to-night, and in this one, where that unlooked-for customer entered, the weary clerk dozed at his post, and her sharp, eager young voice roused him from a disconnected dream.

He sprang to his feet and looked at her, but his sleepy eyes did not take in at first all the misery of that beautiful young face.

“What can I do for you, miss?” he inquired, with a tone of irrepressible admiration in his voice; and the girl reiterated her formula impatiently:

“A phial of laudanum, please.”

Then he looked at her more closely. He saw the misery in the great, heavy black eyes, with the purple shadows lying darkly beneath them, saw how awfully white and anguished was the lovely face with its perfect features, sharpened and refined by keen suffering. He hesitated before he complied with her request.

“We do not usually sell poisons without a doctor’s prescription. Have you one?” he inquired.

She looked at him imploringly, and clasped her delicate hands together. “No, I have not, but for God’s sake do not refuse me,” she cried, almost wildly. “I _must_ have the laudanum! I am suffering so much, and it will still this terrible pain.” She pressed her clenched hands against her pale cheek with a suppressed groan.

The dawning suspicions of the drug clerk were instantly diverted by her expressive movement.

“Oh, if it is the toothache, all right,” he said. “Here it is, miss. A few drops on a bit of cotton will soon relieve you; be careful not to use too much.”

She caught it quickly from his hand with a sudden low, hysterical laugh.

“Thank you a thousand times,” she said. “Oh, yes, I will be very careful; but it is not the toothache, it is the heartache I am going to cure.”

She murmured the last words in an undertone and hurried toward the door before she had done speaking. He saw her pause in the doorway an instant, saw her pull the stopple quickly from the little phial, then she put the deadly drug to her lips, drained the last drop, and threw the empty vessel far from her upon the pavement. All seemed to pass in an instant of time, and before the horrified clerk recovered from the trance of horror with which he beheld her terrible deed, she stepped quickly out into the street, and disappeared in the gloom and darkness of the inclement night.

“Great heaven!” gasped the clerk, springing forward in hot pursuit.

He gained the door, sprang into the street at one bound, and looked about him with straining eyes. The drug store stood on the corner of two streets that intersected each other; he looked hastily up one street and then the other, but vainly. Even in that moment of time the girl had disappeared from his sight like a spirit. Not a person was to be seen, and the hard, white snow freezing sleetily upon the pavements, and shining like diamonds under the light of the flaring gaslamps, held no impression of the light feet that had sped over them so swiftly, and borne her beyond his ken.

My readers, let us turn back a few pages in the tragic life-history of that unhappy creature, and read the story of those heavy sorrows that had driven the young and beautiful girl recklessly and wickedly forward upon the terrible shoals of self-destruction.