On December 10, in the same year, Mr. Bartlett became seriously ill. Peculiar symptoms developed, which excited the curiosity and surprise of the medical man called in to attend him. The state of his gums suggested to the doctor that the illness was due to mercury, which in some way was being taken or administered to him, and he complained of nervous depression and sleeplessness. He appeared to be gradually recovering from this, but on December 19, Mr. Bartlett himself suggested that a second doctor should be called in, lest, as he put it, "his friends should suspect, if anything happened to him, that his wife was poisoning him." The cause for this was put down to some ill-feeling which had formerly existed between Mrs. Bartlett and her husband's father. A second practitioner, therefore, was called in, and the patient, on December 26, was practically well and went out for a drive though still weak. The next day Mrs. Bartlett asked Mr. Dyson, who was constantly calling at the house, to procure for her a considerable quantity of chloroform, which she told him she had used before with good effect on her husband for some internal ailment of long standing, and that this internal affliction had upon previous occasions given him paroxysms. She further expressed apparently some belief that he might die suddenly in one of these attacks. Dyson seems meekly to have yielded to her request, and obtained three different lots of chloroform, in all six ounces, from various chemists, giving the reason, that he required it for taking out grease spots, and placed it all together in one bottle. Two days after he met Mrs. Bartlett on the Embankment and handed her the chloroform. During his illness, Mr. Bartlett had slept on a camp bedstead in the front drawing-room, his wife occupying a sofa in the same room. On December 31 he was apparently quite well again, and about half-past ten o'clock in the evening, Mrs. Bartlett told the servant she required nothing else and retired with her husband for the night. At four o'clock in the morning the house was aroused by Mrs. Bartlett, and it was discovered her husband was dead in bed.