Judith was, I believed, fond of me, but she was very undemonstrative by nature, and she was often scornful and impatient of what she called my sentimental and outworn ideas. I was, frankly, a little nervous of my daughter!

At this point my meditations were interrupted by the train drawing up at the station of Styles St. Mary. That at least had not changed. Time had passed it by. It was still perched up in the midst of fields, with apparently no reason for existence. As my taxi passed through the village, though, I realized the passage of years. Styles St. Mary was altered out of all recognition. Petrol stations, a cinema, two more inns and rows of council houses.

Presently we turned in at the gate of the Styles. Here we seemed to recede again from modern times. The park was much as I remembered it, but the drive was badly kept and much overgrown with weeds - growing up over the gravel. We turned a corner and came in view of the house. It was unaltered from the outside and badly needed a coat of paint.

As on my arrival all those years ago, there was a woman's figure stooping over one of the garden beds. My heart missed a beat. Then the figure straightened up and came towards me, and I laughed at myself. No greater contrast to the robust Evelyn Howard could have been imagined.

This was a frail elderly lady with an abundance of curly white hair, pink cheeks, and a pair of cold pale blue eyes that were widely at variance with the easy geniality of her manner, which was frankly a shade too gushing for my taste.

"It'll be Captain Hastings now, won't it?" she demanded. "And me with my hands all over dirt and not able to shake hands. We're delighted to see you here - the amount we've heard about you! I must introduce myself. I'm Mrs. Luttrell. My husband and I bought this place in a fit of madness and have been trying to make a paying concern of it. I never thought the day would come when I'd be a hotelkeeper! But I'll warn you, Captain Hastings, I'm a very businesslike woman. I pile up the extras all I know how."

We both laughed as though at an excellent joke, but it occurred to me that what Mrs. Luttrell had just said was in all probability the literal truth. Behind the veneer of her charming old-lady manner, I caught a glimpse of flintlike hardness. Although Mrs. Luttrell occasionally affected a faint brogue, she had no Irish blood. It was a mere affectation.

I inquired after my friend.

"Ah, poor little M. Poirot. The way he's been looking forward to your coming. It would melt a heart of stone. Terribly sorry I am for him, suffering the way he does."

We were walking towards the house and she was peeling off her gardening gloves.

"And your pretty daughter, too," she went on. "What a lovely girl she is. We all admire her tremendously. But I'm old-fashioned, you know, and it seems to me a shame and a sin that a girl like that, that ought to be going to parties and dancing with young men, should spend her time cutting up rabbits and bending over a microscope all day. Leave that sort of thing to the frumps, I say." "Where is Judith?" I asked. "Is she somewhere about?" Mrs. Luttrell made what children call