She got up and went towards the window. Then, standing there, she turned her head sharply.

“I wonder,” she said, “who wrote it?”

“We’re never likely to know,” I said.

“No—I suppose not.” She was silent a moment, and then said: “I don’t know when I come to think of it that it is so funny after all. You know, I thought they—they liked us down here.”

“So they do,” I said. “This is just some half-crazy brain on the borderline.”

“I suppose so. Ugh— Nasty!”

As she went out into the sunshine I thought to myself as I smoked my after-breakfast cigarette that she was quite right. It was nasty. Someone resented our coming here—someone resented Joanna’s bright young sophisticated beauty—somebody wanted to hurt. To take it with a laugh was perhaps the best way—but deep down it wasn’t funny….

Dr. Griffith came that morning. I had fixed up for him to give me a weekly overhaul. I liked Owen Griffith. He was dark, ungainly, with awkward ways of moving and deft, very gentle hands. He had a jerky way of talking and was rather shy.

He reported progress to be encouraging. Then he added:

“You’re feeling all right, aren’t you. Is it my fancy, or are you a bit under the weather this morning?”

“Not really,” I said. “A particularly scurrilous anonymous letter arrived with the morning coffee, and it’s left rather a nasty taste in the mouth.”

He dropped his bag on the floor. His thin dark face was excited.

“Do you mean to say that you’ve had one of them?”

I was interested.

“They’ve been going about, then?”

“Yes. For some time.”

“Oh,” I said, “I see. I was under the impression that our presence as strangers was resented here.”

“No, no, it’s nothing to do with that. It’s just—” He paused and then asked, “What did it say? At least—” he turned suddenly red and embarrassed— “perhaps I oughtn’t to ask?”

“I’ll tell you with pleasure,” I said. “It just said that the fancy tart I’d brought down with me wasn’t my sister—not ’alf! And that, I may say, is a Bowdlerized version.”

His dark face flushed angrily.

“How damnable! Your sister didn’t—she’s not upset, I hope?”

“Joanna,” I said, “looks a little like the angel off the top of the Christmas tree, but she’s eminently modern and quite tough. She found it highly entertaining. Such things haven’t come her way before.”

“I should hope not, indeed,” said Griffith warmly.

“And anyway,” I said firmly. “That’s the best way to take it, I think. As something utterly ridiculous.”

“Yes,” said Owen Griffith. “Only—”

“Quite so,” I said. “Only is the word!”

“The trouble is,” he said, “that this sort of thing, once it starts, grows.”

“So I should imagine.”

“It’s pathological, of course.”

I nodded. “Any idea who’s behind it?” I asked.

“No, I wish I had. You see, the anonymous letter pest arises from one of two causes. Either it’s particular—directed at one particular person or set of people, that is to say it’s motivated, it’s someone who’s got a definite grudge (or thinks they have) and who chooses a particularly nasty and underhand way of working it off. It’s mean and disgusting but it’s not necessarily crazy, and it’s usually fairly easy to trace the writer—a discharged servant, a jealous woman—and so on. But if it’s general, and not particular, then it’s more serious. The letters are sent indiscriminately and serve the purpose of working off some frustration in the writer’s mind. As I say, it’s definitely pathological. And the craze grows. In the end, of course, you track down the person in question—it’s often someone extremely unlikely, and that’s that. There was a bad outburst of the kind over the other side of the county last year—turned out to be the head of the millinery department in a big draper’s establishment. Quiet, refined woman—had been there for years. I remember something of the same kind in my last practice up north—but that turned out to be purely personal spite. Still, as I say, I’ve seen something of this kind of thing, and, quite frankly, it frightens me!”