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In the sunset of a beautiful August day, nearly 15 years ago,

a slight, small, cold little woman stood at the bar of the old criminal court in Liverpool,

receiving her sentence of death for murder

by poison. And of all the throng that filled the court in that supreme moment, their eyes fixed upon her,

her hands resting lightly on the dock rail, she faced the judge in the black cap. She alone was in complete

command of herself. Not a muscle in the colorless dead wall of her face moved. The blonde

hair neatly combed and frilled with severe accuracy never stirred. The light eyebrows never twitched

as the words of the sentence dooming her to death by the rope fell upon her ear. An additional

compression of the thin lips with their uncomfortable tightness at the corners, a colder glint than usual in the hardest

eyes ever seen in man or woman. And that was all. And as the voice of the judge ceased, she

turned, and with something of the smooth, soft, live grace of a panther, fitted down the steps of the dock to the cells below.

The woman was Florence Elizabeth Maybrook, who from that time had been more or less an

object of a certain morbid, sympathetic interest to a large part of the public in England and America. The alleged victim was her

husband, James Mabrick. Battlecreece House, one of a series of villa residences built in and around

Garston, a suburb of Liverpool, is beloved of the merchant to the flash stockbroker, the professional man,

and the wealthy shopkeeper. It was on the March of 1889. The Maybricks had met on an Atlantic

liner bound from New York to Liverpool. They had been eight years married.

Those eight years told the story of a haggard, weariness, and peevish discontent,

of a ceaseless dragging at the chain that held them together.

The husband, with his heavy head and his heavy jaw,

held fast by the domestic law, sacred in all English households, that the wife is the obedient, blind, unquestioning slave

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