"Doesn't seem to," said Colonel Carbury gruffly. He looked curiously at Poirot.

"There is one more possibility," said Poirot. "Mrs. Lennox Boynton just now negated strongly the possibility of her young sister-in-law being guilty. The force of her objection lay in the fact that she knew her mother-in-law to be dead at the time. But remember this: Ginevra Boynton was at the camp all the afternoon. And there was a moment—a moment when Lady Westholme and Miss Pierce were walking away from the camp and before Dr. Gerard had returned to it . . ."

Ginevra stirred. She leaned forward, staring into Poirot's face with a strange, innocent, puzzled stare. "I did it? You think I did it?" Then suddenly, with a movement of swift, incomparable beauty, she was up from her chair and had flung herself across the room and down on her knees beside Dr. Gerard, clinging to him, gazing up passionately into his face.

"No! No! Don't let them say it! They're making the walls close around me again! It's not true! I never did anything! They are my enemies—they want to put me in prison—to shut me up. You must help me! You must help me!"

"There, there, my child." Gently the doctor patted her head. Then he addressed Poirot. "What you say is nonsense—absurd."

"Delusions of persecution?" murmured Poirot.

"Yes—but she could never have done it that way. She would have done it, you must perceive, dramatically—a dagger, something flamboyant, spectacular—never this cool, calm logic! I tell you, my friends, it is so. This was a reasoned crime—a sane crime."

Poirot smiled. Unexpectedly he bowed. "Je suis entierement de votre avis," he said smoothly.

18

"Come," said Hercule Poirot. "We have still a little way to go! Dr. Gerard has invoked the psychology. So let us now examine the psychological side of the case. We have taken the facts, we have established a chronological sequence of events, we have heard the evidence. There remains—the psychology. And the most important psychological evidence concerns the dead woman. It is the psychology of Mrs. Boynton herself that is the most important thing in this case."

"Take from my list of specified facts points three and four. Mrs. Boynton took definite pleasure in keeping her family from enjoying themselves with other people. Mrs. Boynton, on the afternoon in question, encouraged her family to go away and leave her."

"These two facts, they contradict each other flatly! Why, on this particular afternoon, should Mrs. Boynton suddenly display a complete reversal of her usual policy? Was it that she felt a sudden warmth of the heart—an instinct of benevolence? That, it seems to me from all I have heard, was extremely unlikely! Yet there must have been a reason. What was that reason?"

"Let us examine closely the character of Mrs. Boynton. There have been many different accounts of her. She was a tyrannical old martinet, she was a mental sadist, she was an incarnation of evil, she was crazy. Which of these views is the true one?"