“No,” she said. “There wasn’t any final breach. I’m afraid it’s a little difficult to put it into words. Our marriage had pretty well broken up by the time I met Pompey, of course, or all this would never have happened. But what had really broken it up was simply money—having no money, I mean, of course. I’m afraid that sounds rather brutal, but it is the fact. We are—we were always quite fond of each other, though it hadn’t been a love match by any means. But we were neither of us much good at economizing, and I”—she glanced round the room and settled herself back more deeply among the cushions—“I like my little comforts, you see; I wasn’t made to live on bread and cheese and kisses, and when the cash ran short, well—life simply became a cat and dog fight. So when this chance came along I told Charles that I’d simply got to take it. It was a bit hard on him, I know, but he saw my point.”

“Do you mind if I smoke a pipe?” the inspector asked irrelevantly.

“Oh, not a bit. Please do. I like to see a man smoke a pipe.” Mrs. Eales’s mind reacted to certain stimuli with the infallibility of a penny-in-the-slot machine. In response to Mallett’s request the appropriate cliché popped out almost of its own volition.

Behind the comforting cloud of tobacco smoke Mallett tried to visualize the situation Mrs. Eales had been describing—the selfish, shiftless couple, tied in matrimony the bands of which grew more and more frayed as their money melted away, the wife calmly announcing that she was going to live with a man who could keep her in comfort, and the husband—what had his attitude been? What would the attitude of such a man as Captain Eales be?

“What terms did your husband make for consenting to this arrangement?” he asked.

“Terms? I don’t understand.”

“But, Mrs. Eales,” said Mallett in tones of gentle expostulation, “you can’t really ask me to believe that your husband simply let this happen without trying to get something out of it for himself.”

She shook her head.