These thoughts took no more than a moment. She repeated her former mild “Dear me!” and enquired,

“What makes you think your husband is trying to kill you?”

Not a muscle of Lisle’s face had moved. She had spoken in a flat, emotionless tone. It did not vary now.

“They said so.”

“Yes? And who were ‘they’?”

“I don’t know – I was behind the hedge-” Her voice trailed away. Her eyes remained open, but instead of seeing Miss Silver they saw the hedge, a long, dark wall of yew set here and there with berries like little blood-red bells with the green seed for a clapper. She was not in the railway carriage any more. She was standing pressed close up against the hedge with the sun shining hot on her back and the queer stuffy smell of the yew in her nostrils. She was looking at one of those crimson berries with the bloom on it, and all at once voices came to her from the other side of the hedge:

“Of course you know what they say-” A slow, drawling voice.

“My dear, you might as well tell me.” A voice that hurried and was amused.

And then the first voice again.

Lisle found herself speaking to the frumpy little woman in the opposite corner. If she spoke, it would stop those other voices.

“I didn’t know they were speaking about Dale -not at first. I oughtn’t to have listened, but I couldn’t help it.”

Miss Silver had opened her bag and put away the magazine. She was now placidly knitting the second of a pair of grey stockings for Ethel’s eldest boy. The bright steel needles clicked as she said,

“Very natural. Dale is your husband?”

“Yes.”

It was a relief to speak. The sound of her own voice drowned the voices which had spoken about Dale. When she was silent they went on speaking all the time in her head, round and round and round like a gramophone record. They were beginning again now, and she could smell the yew with the sun on it.