I can also understand why these beautiful-women-elderly-husband cases scarcely starred our Island story prior to the ’fifties of the last century.  It was only when chemical analysis had approached its present standard of perfection that the presence of the more subtle poisons could be detected in the stomach and intestines, and that the young and beautiful wife could be charged with and found guilty of the deed by the damning evidence of an analytical chemist.

It was Rossiter who secured for David the conduct of Lady Shillito’s defence.  Arbella[1] Shillito was his second cousin, a Rossiter by birth, and would fain have married Michael herself, only that he was not at that time thinking of marriage, and when his thoughts turned that way—­the very day after, as it were—­he met Linda Bennet and her thousands a year.  But he retained a half humorous liking for this handsome young woman.

  [Footnote 1:  An old Northumbrian variant of Arabella.]

Arbella, disappointed over Michael—­though she was a mere slip of a girl at the time—­next decided that she must marry money.  When she was twenty-one she met Grimthorpe Shillito, an immensely rich man of Newcastle-on-Tyne, whose foundries poured out big guns and many other things made of iron and steel combined with acids and brains.  Grimthorpe was a curious-looking person, even at forty; in appearance a mixture of Julius Caesar, several unpleasant-featured Doges of Venice, and Voltaire in middle age.  His looks were not entirely his fault and doubtless acquired for him, in his moral character, a worse definition than he deserved.  He had travelled much in his pursuit of metallurgy and chemistry; at forty he saw rising before him the prospect of a peerage, due either for his extraordinary discoveries and inventions in our use of steel, or easily purchasable out of his immense wealth.  What is the good of a peerage if it ends with your life?  He was not without his vanities, though one of the most cynical men of his cynical period.

He arrived therefore at the decision that he would marry some young and buxom creature of decent birth and fit in appearance to be a peeress, and decided on Arbella Rossiter.

After a gulp or two and several moues behind 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.”