All sorts of complications may arise."
"It was an illiterate sort of letter," I said thoughtfully, "written by somebody practically illiterate, I should say."
"Was it?" said Owen and went away.
Thinking it over afterward, I found that
"Was it?" rather disturbing.
I am not going to pretend that the arrival of our anonymous letter did not leave a nasty taste in the mouth.
It did.
At the same time, it soon passed out of my mind.
I did not, you see, at that point, take it seriously.
I think I remember saying to myself that these things probably happen fairly often in out-of-the-way villages.
Some hysterical woman with a taste for dramatising herself was probably at the bottom of it.
Anyway, if the letters were as childish and silly as the one we had got, they couldn't do much harm.
The next incident, if I may put it so, occurred about a week later, when Partridge, her lips set tightly together, informed me that Beatrice, the daily help, would not be coming today.
"I gather, sir," said Partridge, "that the girl has been upset."
I was not very sure what Partridge was implying, but I diagnosed (wrongly) some stomach trouble to which Partridge was too delicate to allude more directly.
I said I was sorry and hoped she would soon be better.
"The girl is perfectly well, sir," said Partridge. "She is upset in her feelings."
"Oh," I said rather doubtfully.
"Owing," went on Partridge, "to a letter she has received.
Making, I understand, insinuations."
The grimness of Partridge's eye made me apprehensive that the insinuations were concerned with me.
Since I could hardly have recognised Beatrice by sight if I had met her in the town, so unaware of her had I been, I felt a not unnatural annoyance.
An invalid hobbling about on two sticks is hardly cast for the role of deceiver of village girls.
I said irritably: "What nonsense!"
"My very words, sir, to the girl's mother," said Partridge. "'Goings-on in this house,' I said to her, 'there never have been and never will be while I am in charge.
As to Beatrice,' I said, 'girls are different nowadays, and as to goings-on elsewhere I can say nothing.'
But the truth is, sir, that Beatrice's friend from the garage as she walks out with got one of them nasty letters, too, and he isn't acting reasonable at all."
"I have never heard anything so preposterous in my life," I said angrily.
"It's my opinion, sir," said Partridge, "that we're well rid of the girl.
What I say is, she wouldn't take on so if there wasn't something she didn't want found out.
No smoke without fire, that's what I say."
I had no idea how horribly tired I was going to get of that particular phrase.
That morning, by way of adventure, I was to walk down to the village.
The sun was shining, the air was cool and crisp with the sweetness of spring in it.
I assembled my sticks and started off, firmly refusing to permit Joanna to accompany me.
It was arranged that she should pick me up with the car and drive me back up the hill in time for lunch.
"That ought to give you time to pass the time of day with everyone in Lymstock."
"I have no doubt," I said, "that I shall have seen anybody who is anybody by then."
For morning in the High Street was a kind of rendezvous for shoppers, when news was exchanged.
I did not, after all, walk down to the town unaccompanied.
I had gone about two hundred yards, when I heard a bicycle bell behind me, then a scrunching of brakes, and then Megan Hunter more or less fell off her machine at my feet.
"Hullo," she said breathlessly as she rose and dusted herself off.
I rather liked Megan and always felt oddly sorry for her.
She was Symmington the lawyer's stepdaughter, Mrs. Symmington's daughter by a first marriage.
Nobody talked much about Mr. (or Captain) Hunter, and I gathered that he was considered best forgotten.
He was reported to have treated Mrs. Symmington very badly. She had divorced him a year or two after the marriage.
She was a woman with means of her own and had settled down with her little daughter in Lymstock "to forget," and had eventually married the only eligible bachelor in the place, Richard Symmington.
There were two boys of the second marriage to whom their parents were devoted, and I fancied that Megan sometimes felt odd-man in the establishment.
She certainly did not resemble her mother, who was a small anaemic woman, fadedly pretty, who talked in a thin melancholy voice of servant difficulties and her health.
Megan was a tall awkward girl, and although she was actually twenty, she looked more like a schoolgirlish sixteen.