Why write that - a lie - at such a solemn moment?
To spare your child pain?
Yes, many women would do that.
But I should not have thought it of Mrs Crale.
She was a brave woman and a truthful woman.
I should have thought it far more like her to have told her daughter not to judge."
Poirot said with slight exasperation,
"You will not even consider, then, the possibility that what Caroline Crale wrote was the truth?"
"Certainly not!" Miss Williams looked at Poirot in a very odd way.
"It doesn't matter my saying this now - so long afterward.
You see, I happen to know that Caroline Crale was guilty!"
"What?"
"It's true.
Whether I did right in withholding what I knew at the time I cannot be sure, but I did withhold it.
But you must take it from me, quite definitely, that I know Caroline Crale was guilty..."
Angela Warren's flat overlooked Regent's Park.
Here, on this spring day, a soft air wafted in through the open window and one might have had the illusion that one was in the country if it had not been for the steady menacing roar of the traffic passing below.
Poirot turned from the window as the door opened and Angela Warren came into the room.
It was not the first time he had seen her.
He had availed himself of the opportunity to attend a lecture she had given at the Royal Geographical.
It had been, he considered, an excellent lecture. Dry, perhaps, from the view of popular appeal.
Miss Warren had an excellent delivery; she neither paused nor hesitated for a word. She did not repeat herself.
The tones of her voice were clear and not unmelodious.
She made no concessions to romantic appeal or love of adventure. There was very little human interest in the lecture. It was an admirable recital of concise facts, adequately illustrated by excellent slides, and with intelligent deductions from the facts recited.
Dry, precise, clear, lucid, highly technical.
The soul of Hercule Poirot approved.
Here, he considered, was an orderly mind.
Now that he saw her at close quarters he realized that Angela Warren might easily have been a very handsome woman.
Her features were regular, though severe. She had finely marked dark brows, clear, intelligent brown eyes, a fine, pale skin. She had very square shoulders and a slightly mannish walk.
There was certainly about her no suggestion of the little pig who cried, "Wee-wee." But on the right cheek, disfiguring and puckering the skin, was that healed scar. The right eye was slightly distorted, the corner pulled downward by it, but no one would have realized that the sight of that eye was destroyed.
It seemed to Hercule Poirot almost certain that she had lived with that disability so long that she was now completely unconscious of it.
And it occurred to him that of the five people in whom he had become interested as a result of his investigations, those who might have been said to start with the fullest advantages were not those who had actually wrested the most success and happiness from life.
Elsa, who might have been said to have started with all advantages - youth, beauty, riches - had done worst.
She was like a flower overtaken by untimely frost - still in bud but without life.
Cecilia Williams, to outward appearances, had no assets of which to boast.
Nevertheless, to Poirot's eye, there was no despondency there and no sense of failure.
Miss Williams's life had been interesting to her - she was still interested in people and events.
She had that enormous mental and moral advantage of a strict Victorian upbringing, denied to us in these days - she had done her duty in that station of life to which it had pleased God to call her, and that assurance encased her in an armor impregnable to the slings and darts of envy, discontent, and regret.
She had her memories, her small pleasures, made possible by stringent economies, and sufficient health and vigor to enable her still to be interested in life.
Now, in Angela Warren - that young creature handicapped by disfigurement and its consequent humiliations - Poirot believed he saw a spirit strengthened by its necessary fight for confidence and assurance.
The undisciplined schoolgirl had given place to a vital and forceful woman, a woman of considerable mental power and gifted with abundant energy to accomplish ambitious purposes. She was a woman, Poirot felt sure, both happy and successful. Her life was full and vivid and eminently enjoyable. She was not, incidentally, the type of woman that Poirot really liked. Though admiring the clear-cut precision of her mind, she had just a sufficient nuance of the femme formidable about her to alarm him as a mere man.
His taste had always been for the flamboyant and extravagant.
With Angela Warren it was easy to come to the point of his visit.
There was no subterfuge. He merely recounted Carla Lemarchant's interview with him.
Angela Warren's severe face lighted up appreciatively.
"Little Carla? She is over here?
I would like to see her so much."
"You have not kept in touch with her?"
"Hardly as much as I should have done.
I was a schoolgirl at the time she went to Canada, and I realized, of course, that in a year or two she would have forgotten me.