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.