Little by little the crying ceased.
She stood quite still, her face working, her hands clutching the black stuff of her frock.
At last she was silent again.
Then Colonel Julyan spoke, quietly, slowly.
'Mrs Danvers,' he said, 'can you think of any reason, however remote, why Mrs de Winter should have taken her own life?'
Mrs Danvers swallowed. She went on clutching at her frock. She shook her head.
'No,' she said.
'No.'
"There, you see?' Favell said swiftly.
'It's impossible.
She knows that as well as I do.
I've told you already.'
'Be quiet, will you?' said Colonel Julyan.
'Give Mrs Danvers time to think.
We all of us agree that on the face of it the thing's absurd, out of the question.
I'm not disputing the truth or veracity of that note of yours.
It's plain for us to see.
She wrote you that note some time during those hours she spent in London.
There was something she wanted to tell you.
It's just possible that if we knew what that something was we might have the answer to the whole appalling problem.
Let Mrs Danvers read the note.
She may be able to throw light on it.'
Favell shrugged his shoulders.
He felt in his pocket for the note and threw it on the floor at Mrs Danvers' feet.
She stooped and picked it up.
We watched her lips move as she read the words.
She read it twice.
Then she shook her head.
'It's no use,' she said.
'I don't know what she meant.
If there was something important she had to tell Mr Jack she would have told me first.'
'You never saw her that night?'
'No, I was out.
I was spending the afternoon and evening in Kerrith.
I shall never forgive myself for that.
Never till my dying day.'
'Then you know of nothing on her mind, you can't suggest a solution, Mrs Danvers?
Those words "I have something to tell you" do not convey anything to you at all?'
'No,' she answered.
'No, sir, nothing at all.'
'Does anybody know how she spent that day in London?'
Nobody answered.
Maxim shook his head.
Favell swore under his breath.
'Look here, she left that note at my flat at three in the afternoon,' he said.
'The porter saw her.
She must have driven down here straight after that, and gone like the wind too.'
'Mrs de Winter had a hair appointment from twelve until one thirty,' said Mrs Danvers.
'I remember that, because I had to telephone through to London from here earlier in the week and book it for her.
I remember doing it.