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 in the North.

But Shillito pondered gravely over the specialist’s carefully guarded phrases about “growths, possibly malign, but at the same time—­difficult to be sure quite so soon—­perhaps harmless, might of course be merely severe suppressed jaundice.”  When the pains began—­he hated the idea of operations, and knew that any operation on the liver only at best staved off the dread, inevitable end for a year or a few months—­When the pains began, he had grown utterly tired of life; so he compounded a subtle poison—­he was a great chemist and had—­only his wife knew not of this—­a cabinet which contained a variety of mineral, vegetable, and acid poisons; and kept the draught in a secret locker in his bedroom.  Meantime Arbella, who after all was human, was tortured at the sight of his tortures.  She felt she must end it, or her nerves would give way.  She trebled, she quintupled the dose of aqua distillata embittered with quinine.  One night when the night nurse was sleeping ("resting her eyes,” she called it) the wretched man stole from his bed to the night nursery and kissed both his boys.  He then swiftly took the phial from its hiding place and drank the contents and died in one ghastly minute.

When the night nurse awoke he was crisped in a horrible rigor.  On the night table was the phial with the remains of the draught.  She had noticed in the last day or two Lady Shillito fussing a good deal about the sick man, pressing on him doses of a colourless medicine. What if she had stolen in while the nurse was asleep and placed a finally fatal draught by the bedside? From that she proceeded to argue (when she had leisure to think it out) that she hadn’t been to sleep, had merely been resting her eyes.  And she was now sure that whilst she had closed those orbs she had heard—­as indeed she had, only it was Sir Grimthorpe himself—­some one stealing into the room.