Here you have the stuff, at any rate, of which your murderesses of the violent type are made. It is the metal out of which your Kate Websters, your Sarah Malcolms, your Meteyards and Brownriggs fashion themselves. It takes more than three years of scholastic self-discipline, such as Sophie Dawes in her ambition subjected herself to, to eradicate the inborn harridan. The very determination which was at the back of Sophie's efforts at self-education, that will to have her own way, would serve to heighten the sick rage with which she would discover that her carefully wrought plans of seven years had come to pieces. What was it that the Abbe Pelier de Lacroix had in "proof of the horrible assassination" of the Prince de Conde, but that he was prevented from placing before the lawyers in charge of the later investigation, if not the fact that the Prince had made a later will than the one by which Sophie inherited so greatly? The Abbe was the Prince's chaplain. He published a pamphlet declaring that the Prince had made a will leaving his entire fortune to the little Duc de Bordeaux, but that Sophie had stolen this later will. Who likelier to be a witness to such a will than the Prince's chaplain? It needs no great feat of imagination to picture what the effect of such a discovery would be on a woman of Sophie's violent temper, or to conceive how little the matter of taking a life especially the life of a feeble old man she was used to bullying and mishandling--would be allowed to stand in the way of rescuing her large gains. Murder of the Prince was her only chance. It had taken her seven years to bring him to the point of signing that first will. He was seventy-four years of age, enfeebled, obstinate, and she knew of his plans to flee from her. Even supposing that she could prevent his flight, could she begin all over again to another seven years of bullying and wheedling--always with the prospect of the old man dying before she could get him to the point again of doing as she wished? The very existence of the second will was a menace. It only needed that the would-be heirs of the Prince should hear of it, and there would be a swoop on their part to rescue the testator from her clutches. In the balance against 2,000,000 francs and some halfdozen castles with their estates the only wonder is that any reasonable person, knowing the history of Sophie Dawes, should hesitate about the value she was likely to place on the old man's life.