His vulgar wife answered me before he could speak.
'Madame Fontaine,' said this spitfire, 'my husband and I don't feel _your_ sympathy with poisoners!' Take that as a specimen of the ladies of Wurzburg--and let me close this unmercifully long letter.

I think you will acknowledge, my dear, that, when I do write, I place a flattering trust in my friend's patient remembrance of me." There the newspaper extracts came to an end.
As a picture of a perverted mind, struggling between good and evil, and slowly losing ground under the stealthy influence of temptation, the letters certainly possessed a melancholy interest for any thoughtful reader.

But (not being a spiteful woman) I failed to see, in these extracts, the connection which Frau Meyer had attempted to establish between the wickedness of Madame Fontaine and the disappearance of her husband's medicine chest.
At the same time, I must acknowledge that a vague impression of distrust _was_ left on my mind by what I had read.

I felt a certain sense of embarrassment at the prospect of renewing my relations with the widow, on my return to Frankfort; and I was also conscious of a decided increase of anxiety to hear what had been Mr.Keller's reception of Madame Fontaine's letter.

Add to this, that my brotherly interest in Minna was sensibly strengthened--and the effect on me of the extracts in the newspaper is truly stated, so far as I can remember it at this distant time.
On the evening of the next day, I was back again at Frankfort.
(1) The terrible career of Anna Maria Zwanziger, sentenced to death at Bamberg in the year 1811, will be found related in Lady Duff-Gordon's translation of Feuerbach's "Criminal Trials.".