"Oh, it is! But I think these girls, when they come home, they get rather restless - and if there is someone else about - someone, perhaps, who has led an adventurous life -"

"Such as David Hunter?"

"There isn't anything between them," Aunt Kathie said anxiously.

"Nothing at all. I'm quite sure of that! It would have been dreadful if there had been, wouldn't there, with his turning out a murderer? His own brother-in-law, too! Oh, no, M. Poirot, please don't run away with the idea that there's any kind of an understanding between Lynn and David. Really, they seemed to quarrel more than anything else every time they met. What I feel is that - oh, dear, I think that's my husband coming. You will remember, won't you, M. Poirot, not a word about our first meeting? My poor dear husband gets so annoyed if he thinks that - oh, Lionel dear, here is M. Poirot who so cleverly brought that Major Porter down to see the body."

Dr Cloade looked tired and haggard. His eyes, pale blue, with pin-point pupils, wandered vaguely round the room.

"How do you do, M. Poirot, on your way back to town?"

"Mon Dieu, another who packs me back to London!" thought Poirot.

Aloud he said patiently:

"No, I remain at the Stag for a day or so."

"The Stag?" Lionel Cloade frowned. "Oh? Police want to keep you here for a bit?"

"No. It is my own choice."

"Indeed?" The doctor suddenly flashed a quick intelligent look. "So you're not satisfied?"

"Why should you think that, Dr Cloade?"

"Come, man, it's true, isn't it?"

Twittering about tea, Mrs Cloade left the room. The doctor went on:

"You've a feeling, haven't you, that something's wrong?"

Poirot was startled.

"It is odd that you should say that. Do you, then, feel that yourself?"

Cloade hesitated.

"N-n-o. Hardly that... perhaps it's just a feeling of unreality. In books the blackmailer gets slugged. Does he in real life? Apparently the answer is yes. But it seems unnatural."

"Was there anything unsatisfactory about the medical aspect of the case? I ask unofficially, of course."

Dr Cloade said thoughtfully:

"No, I don't think so."

"Yes - there is something. I can see there is something."

When he wished, Poirot's voice could assume an almost hypnotic quality. Dr Cloade frowned a little, then he said hesitatingly:

"I've no experience, of course, of police cases. And anyway medical evidence isn't the hard-and-fast, cast-iron business that laymen or novelists seem to think. We're fallible - medical science is fallible. What's diagnosis? A guess, based on a very little knowledge, and some indefinite clues which point in more than one direction. I'm pretty sound, perhaps, at diagnosing measles because, at my time of life, I've seen hundreds of cases of measles and I know an extraordinary wide variation of signs and symptoms. You hardly ever get what a text book tells you is a 'typical case' of measles. But I've known some queer things in my time - I've seen a woman practically on the operating table ready for her appendix to be whipped out - and paratyphoid diagnosed just in time! I've seen a child with skin trouble pronounced as a case of serious vitamin deficiency by an earnest and conscientious young doctor - and the local vet comes along and mentions to the mother that the cat the child is hugging has got ringworm and that the child has caught it!