Summary. It was Miss Effie Strange, and for money, not for the grudge the house offered first; she put laudanum from her own bottle into three pieces of the marzipan, smothered the Reverend Simeon Gaunt with a square of his host's mulberry silk while the party believed her gone to measure a glove, and left a glass of doctored water at his elbow to make a temperance man look a secret drinker. Here is how I came to it.

The Reckoning. Gaunt kept his habits like a clock, and the house let him: at ten he withdrew to sit an hour with his list and his pencil, and nobody thought to watch him do it. The marzipan went through the gallery to the billiard-room mantel at that same hour, carried past every guest in the house, which is the only dish in the party that could have been tampered with by someone who never crossed the gallery's length to do it. Three pieces were gone from it when he was found, and three pieces is enough. A man who eats once a day and takes no wine does not notice a stranger's hand in his pudding; he noticed nothing at all, being past noticing anything within the quarter hour. The mulberry was unpinned from card seventeen, used, and put back — the pin set straight through the empty card, which is not a murderer's flourish but a tidy woman's habit, and told me more about her character than her hand ever will in the dock.

The gallery accounted for the rest of the house, which is the mercy of a crowded room. Xerxes never left the clerk's company from ten until the alarm, three guests and a merchant's man besides the clerk himself keeping him in view. Lavinia sat the whole interval with her hands held by strangers giving a sitting, which is as good as chains. Captain Frew was in the yard disputing a bill of lading with two grooms and a carter who never lost sight of him. Aziz was placed at every quarter hour between the gallery and the pantry by the butler and two footmen, and nothing in Gaunt's list touched him in any case. Dr Quill was at cards before four witnesses and came through the gallery only at the cry, by which time the thing was long done. Of the whole party only one woman went through to the billiard room in that quarter hour and was not accounted for the rest of it, and that was Miss Strange, gone, she said, to measure a glove.

The true grain of it is plainer than the house's first guess, which ran to Lavinia and her allowance and her brother's satisfaction in doling it to her — old fuel, but she never left her chair. Gaunt's inquiry into the laudanum trade had already reached Miss Strange by letter three weeks before, the Colonel's man of business instructed to pay her no more cash in hand, only vouched bills; and his list, found in his pocket with four names struck through and one not, showed whose turn had come. What she lived on — I mean her bottle, and the debts it had put her in, and the solvency she promised herself by Martinmas — is her own affair to answer for; what she did to keep it from being taken from her is mine to set down. She killed a mild, interfering man because he was about to speak to her that night and report her after, and because the only remedy she knew for interference was the one she used on him.

I had nearly set the file aside without the glass, which seemed at first no more than a clumsy piece of staging — a drinker's glass left by an abstainer, to muddy the water. But the glass smelled of orange-flower water, and the kitchen puts orange-flower water in nothing served that evening but the marzipan; so whoever poured it had the marzipan's dosing already in hand, and had thought herself cleverer than she was. It is the only vanity she allowed herself in the whole business, and it is enough to hang her twice over, though once will serve.

This is the third such matter I have been called to in this household in the twelvemonth, by my count, and I confess I had hoped, after the last, to be let alone. Miss Strange is charged; the silk merchant may have his billiard room back, and the house its mourning, such as it is inclined to make.

Effie arranged the cards with household care
And Gaunt reclined as though awaiting prayer
The mantel held its sugared little store
While kitchen scents denied what glasses bore
We learn that appetites should not be led
By solemn men who count them from the dead