The Bismarck Tribune

Faith lost all sense of time as she lay there shivering and burning on her hard bed in the Denham House.
The fever which she did not know she had made her doze occasionally, but she was invariably aroused by the urgency of her problem. How could she commit suicide and make her death appear accidental, so that no reproach could come upon Bob and Cherry?
"If I were at home," she thought once, "I could go into the kitchen late tonight, on the pretense that I was hungry. I could prepare to make myself a pot of cocoa, turn on a gas burner without lighting the gas, go on with mixing the cocoa and sugar and setting out my cup and saucer, while the gas poured out into the room. And I'd be dead by the time Bob smelled the gas. But I'm not at home. They're looking for me now, Fay and Junior must have been scared out of their wits when they discovered I was gone. I wonder whether Rhoda got Hope safely home or not. But of course Fay phoned Bob. But he won't know I heard him and Cherry talking. I wonder what he's thinking. Probably they all think I went crazy suddenly."
It must have been nearly eight o'clock when, in a lucid interval, she crawled painfully out of bed, crept to the dresser, smoothed her tumbled hair with the little pocket comb she always carried in her handbag, and pulled on the felt hat which George had brought her. But before she could draw on Selma Pruitt's coat she was lost again, stood staring at her reflected image in the mirror without recognition.
She was brought back to partial consciousness by the ringing of the telephone bell. "I won't answer it," she nodded to her reflection in the mirror. "It might be George and I don't want to talk to him. Or it might be Bob and I can't see him yet. He mustn't know there's anything wrong. It will have to be an accident, an accident. But how?"
A hand tried the door, startling Faith to rigid attention. Then there came a knock. "The chambermaid," Faith told herself, smiling cunningly. "She'll think I'm out."
There was the sound of a key poking at the lock from the outside. Her own key, which she had left in the lock, moved slightly, but was not dislodged. Faith wanted to clap her hands and laugh at the futility of that other key. She listened intently, her head cocked toward the door, as footsteps retreated down the hall. Then her eyes, roving gloatingly about her refuge, fell upon the three bottles of poison which she had left in plain sight upon the writing table. Running to the table she gathered them up in her icy, shaking fingers and looked wildly about for a means of destroying their contents. They must not be found. Her death must look like an accident. She was in the bathroom, emptying the contents of the three sinister bottles into the basin when she heard a loud pounding upon the door of her room.
NEXT: Faith's problem seems likely to solve itself.
(Copyright, 1927, NEA Service, Inc.)