nd his back, she
accepted him. A brilliant marriage ceremony followed, conducted by a
Bishop and an Archdeacon. And then Arbella was carried off to live
in a Bluebeard's Castle he possessed on the Northumbrian coast.

In the three years following her marriage she gave him two boys,
with which he was content, especially as his own health began to
fail a little just then. At the end of four years of marriage with
this cynical, Italianate tyrant, Arbella got very sick of him and
thought more and more tenderly of a certain subaltern in the Cavalry
whom she had once declined to marry on L500 a year. This subaltern
had returned from the South African war, a Colonel and still
extremely good-looking. They had met again at a garden party and
fallen once more deeply in love. If only her tiresome old Borgia
would die--was the thought that came too often into the mind of
Arbella, now entering the "thirties" of life, and with the least
possible misgiving of her Colonel's constancy if she became
presently "_un peu trop mure_."

She noticed at this time that Grimthorpe Shillito went on several
occasions to London to consult a specialist. He complained of
indigestion, was rather thin, and balder than ever, and difficult to
please in his food and appetite.

This was her opportunity. She would have said, had she been
convicted, that he had driven her to it by his cruelties: that's as
may be.--She consulted the family doctor who attended to the
household of Bluebeard's Castle; suggested that Sir Grimthorpe (they
had just knighted him) might be the better for a strychnine tonic;
she had read somewhere that strychnine did wonders for middle-aged
men who had led rather a rackety life in their early manhood.

The family doctor who disliked her and suspected her, as you or I
wouldn't have done, but doctors think of everything, feigned to
agree; and supplied her with little phials of _aqua distillata_
flavoured with quinine. He himself was puzzled over Sir Grimthorpe's
condition but was a little offended at not being personally
consulted.

The fact was that Sir G. had a very poor opinion of his abilities in
diagnosis and being naturally secretive and generally cussed,
preferred consulting a London specialist. He wasn't then Sir
Grimthorpe, the specialist wasn't very certain that it _was_ cancer
on the liver, and amid his multitude of consulters did not, unless
aroused, remember very clearly the case of a Mr. Shillito from
somewhere up i