He carried her through to the kitchen and he had just arranged her comfortably with her head in the gas oven and had turned on the gas when Nash and I came through the kitchen door and switched on the light.

And that was the end of Richard Symmington. He collapsed. Even while I was hauling Megan out and turning off the gas I saw the collapse. He didn’t even try to fight. He knew he’d played and lost.

VII

Upstairs I sat by Megan’s bed waiting for her to come round and occasionally cursing Nash.

“How do you know she’s all right? It was too big a risk.”

Nash was very soothing.

“Just a soporific in the milk she always had by her bed. Nothing more. It stands to reason, he couldn’t risk her being poisoned. As far as he’s concerned the whole business is closed with Miss Griffith’s arrest. He can’t afford to have any mysterious death. No violence, no poison. But if a rather unhappy type of girl broods over her mother’s suicide, and finally goes and puts her head in the gas oven—well, people just say that she was never quite normal and the shock of her mother’s death finished her.”

I said, watching Megan:

“She’s a long time coming round.”

“You heard what Dr. Griffith said? Heart and pulse quite all right—she’ll just sleep and wake naturally. Stuff he gives a lot of his patients, he says.”

Megan stirred. She murmured something.

Superintendent Nash unobtrusively left the room.

Presently Megan opened her eyes. “Jerry.”

“Hallo, sweet.”

“Did I do it well?”

“You might have been blackmailing ever since your cradle!”

Megan closed her eyes again. Then she murmured:

“Last night—I was writing to you—in case anything went—went wrong. But I was too sleepy to finish. It’s over there.”

I went across to the writing-table. In a shabby little blotter I found Megan’s unfinished letter.

“My dear Jerry,” it began primly:

“I was reading my school Shakespeare and the sonnet that begins:

‘So are you to my thoughts as food to life

Or as sweet-season’d showers are to the ground.’

and I see that I am in love with you after all, because that is what I feel….”

Chapter Fourteen

Fourteen

“So you see,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop, “I was quite right to call in an expert.”

I stared at her. We were all at the vicarage. The rain was pouring down outside and there was a pleasant log fire, and Mrs. Dane Calthrop had just wandered round, beat up a sofa cushion and put it for some reason of her own on the top of the grand piano.

“But did you?” I said, surprised. “Who was it? What did he do?”

“It wasn’t a he,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop.