"I'm frightened. David said I'd be safe as long as he was there to look after me. But now they've taken him away - I'm afraid. He said - they all wanted me dead. That's a dreadful thing to say. But perhaps it's true."

"Let me help you, Madame."

She shook her head.

"No," she said. "No one can help me. I can't go to confession, even. I've got to bear the weight of my wickedness all alone. I'm cut off from the mercy of God."

"Nobody," said Hercule Poirot, "is cut off from the mercy of God. You know that well, my child."

Again she looked at him - a wild unhappy look.

"I'd have to confess my sins - to confess. If I could confess -"

"Can't you confess? You came to the church for that, did you not?"

"I came to get comfort - comfort. But what comfort is there for me? I'm a sinner."

"We are all sinners."

"But you'd have to repent - I'd have to say - to tell -" Her hands went up to her face. "Oh, the lies I've told - the lies I've told."

"You told a lie about your husband? About Robert Underhay? It was Robert Underhay who was killed here, wasn't it?"

She turned sharply on him. Her eyes were suspicious, wary. She cried out sharply:

"I tell you it was not my husband. It wasn't the least like him!"

"The dead man was not in the least like your husband?"

"No," she said defiantly.

"Tell me," said Poirot, "what was your husband like?"

Her eyes stared at him. Then her face hardened into alarm. Her eyes grew dark with fear.

She cried out:

"I'll not talk to you any more!"

Going swiftly past him, she ran down the path and passed through the gate out into the market square.

Poirot did not try and follow her. Instead he nodded his head with a good deal of satisfaction.

"Ah," he said. "So that is that!"

He walked slowly out into the square.

After a momentary hesitation he followed the High Street until he came to the Stag, which was the last building before the open country.

In the doorway of the Stag he met Rowley Cloade and Lynn Marchmont.

Poirot looked at the girl with interest. A handsome girl, he thought, and intelligent also. Not the type he himself admired. He preferred something softer, more feminine. Lynn Marchmont, he thought, was essentially a modern type - though one might, with equal accuracy, call it an Elizabethan type. Women who thought for themselves, who were free in language, and who admired enterprise and audacity in men.

"We're very grateful to you, M. Poirot," said Rowley. "By Jove, it really was quite like a conjuring trick."

Which was exactly what it had been, Poirot reflected! Asked a question to which you knew the answer, there was no difficulty whatsoever in performing a trick with the requisite frills. He quite appreciated that to the simple Rowley, the production of Major Porter out of the blue, so to speak, had been as breath-taking as any amount of rabbits produced from the conjurer's hat.