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then pulls desperately at the bell. Mrs. Cavendish, startled, drops her
candle, scattering the grease on the carpet. She picks it up, and retreats
quickly to Mademoiselle Cynthia's room, closing the door behind her. She
hurries out into the passage, for the servants must not find her where she
is. But it is too late! Already footsteps are echoing along the gallery which
connects the two wings. What can she do? Quick as thought, she hurries
back to the young girl's room, and starts shaking her awake. The hastily
aroused household come trooping down the passage. They are all busily
battering at Mrs. Inglethorp's door. It occurs to nobody that Mrs. Cavendish
has not arrived with the rest, but--and this is significant--I can find no one
who saw her come from the other wing." He looked at Mary Cavendish. "Am I
right, madame?"
She bowed her head.
"
Quite right, monsieur. You understand that, if I had thought I would do my
husband any good by revealing these facts, I would have done so. But it did
not seem to me to bear upon the question of his guilt or innocence."
"In a sense, that is correct, madame. But it cleared my mind of many
misconceptions, and left me free to see other facts in their true significance."
"The will!" cried Lawrence. "Then it was you, Mary, who destroyed the will?"
She shook her head, and Poirot shook his also.
"No," he said quietly. "There is only one person who could possibly have
destroyed that will--Mrs. Inglethorp herself!"
"
Impossible!" I exclaimed. "She had only made it out that very afternoon!"
Nevertheless, mon ami, it was Mrs. Inglethorp. Because, in no other way
"
can you account for the fact that, on one of the hottest days of the year,
Mrs. Inglethorp ordered a fire to be lighted in her room."
I gave a gasp. What idiots we had been never to think of that fire as being
incongruous! Poirot was continuing:
"The temperature on that day, messieurs, was 80 degrees in the shade. Yet
Mrs. Inglethorp ordered a fire! Why? Because she wished to destroy
something, and could think of no other way. You will remember that, in
consequence of the War economics practiced at Styles, no waste paper was
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