“If I was you,” he said, “I’d give him a strong sleeping draught; he is a misery to himself and every one else, like this.”
“I only wish I could,” she said. “He gets more nervous and cross every evening; but he won’t take anything.”
“Well, I’d make him; I’d put a dose into his whiskey-and-water, which would send him off fast enough. I’d tell you what to give.”
For one second Jenny seemed to be thinking the matter over. Then she answered,—
“Oh, I wish you would; I would—I’d do it to-morrow; and then you could bring up the diamonds to show me, and we should be alone. Now, write down the stuff I am to get.”
Mr Smythe knew a little about doctoring, so he wrote out the quantities of a drug on a leaf of his note-book, and gave it her.
“Now promise to bring up the diamonds to-morrow, and we will look at them when we are alone and he is asleep.”
“All right,” he said; “but I don’t think they will interest you, and I hardly like bringing them out; but I can’t refuse you anything, my dear.”
Just then Captain Hamilton came in again, and, as he seemed inclined to stay, Mr Smythe took leave of his host and hostess, the latter giving him a look which seemed to say “Don’t forget.”
“By gad, she is a plucky little woman, and dead gone on me! Why, I believe, if I told her to, she’d put a drop of prussic acid in his whiskey!” said Mr Smythe to himself, as he swaggered down to the club from Hamilton’s house.