"Do tell me, why have you never married, Mr. Burton?"
In anyone else it would have been impertinence, but with Mrs. Dane Calthrop you felt that the idea had suddenly come into her head and she had really wanted to know.
"Shall we say," I said, rallying, "that I have never met the right woman?"
"We can say so," said Mrs. Dane Calthrop, "but it wouldn't be a very good answer, because so many men have obviously married the wrong woman."
This time she really departed.
Joanna said, "You know I really do think she's mad.
But I like her.
The people in the village here are afraid of her."
"So am I, a little."
"Because you never know what's coming next?"
"Yes.
And there's a careless brilliancy about her guesses."
Joanna said slowly, "Do you really think whoever wrote these letters is very unhappy?"
"I don't know what the damned hag is thinking or feeling!
And I don't care.
It's her victims I'm sorry for."
It seems odd to me now that in our speculations about Poison Pen's frame of mind we missed the most obvious one.
Griffith had pictured her as possibly exultant.
I had envisaged her as remorseful - appalled by the result of her handiwork.
Mrs. Dane Calthrop had seen her as suffering.
Yet the obvious, the inevitable reaction we did not consider - or perhaps I should say, I did not consider.
That reaction was Fear.
For with the death of Mrs. Symmington, the letters had passed out of one category into another.
I don't know what the legal position was - Symmington knew, I suppose, but it was clear that with a death resulting, the position of the writer of the letters was much more serious.
There could now be no question of passing it off as a joke if the identity of the writer was discovered.
The police were active, a Scotland Yard expert was called in.
It was vital now for the anonymous author to remain anonymous.
And granted that Fear was the principal reaction, other things followed.
Those possibilities also I was blind to. Yet surely they should have been obvious.
Joanna and I came down rather late to breakfast the next morning. That is to say, late by the standards of Lymstock.
It was nine-thirty, an hour at which, in London, Joanna was just unclosing an eyelid, and mine would probably be still tight shut.
However when Partridge had said,
"Breakfast at half past eight, or nine o'clock?" neither Joanna nor I had had the nerve to suggest a later hour.
To my annoyance, Aimйe Griffith was standing on the doorstep talking to Megan.
She gave tongue with her usual heartiness at the sight of us:
"Hullo, there, slackers!
I've been up for hours."
That, of course, was her own business.
A doctor, no doubt, has to have early breakfast, and a dutiful sister is there to pour out his tea or coffee.
But it is no excuse for coming and butting in on one's more somnolent neighbours.
Nine-thirty is not the time for a morning call.
Megan slipped back into the house and into the dining room, where I gathered she had been interrupted in her breakfast.
"I said I wouldn't come in," said Aimйe Griffith - "though why it is more of a merit to force people to come and speak to you on the doorstep, than to talk to them inside the house I do not know.
Just wanted to ask Miss Burton if she'd any vegetables to spare for our Red Cross stall on the main road.
If so, I'd get Owen to call for them in the car."
"You're out and about very early," I said.
"The early bird catches the worm," said Aimйe.
"You have a better chance of finding people in this time of day.
I'm off to Mr. Pye's next. Got to go over to Brenton this afternoon.
Guides."