letters couched in crazy language, he had suso
pected her of composing them herself. She had ac-tually
done such a thing once or twice before. She
was a woman of hysterical tendencies who craved
ceaselessly for excitement.
Now, all that seemed to me very natural--indeed,
we have a young woman in the village who
does much the same thing. The danger with such
people is that when anything at all extraordinary
really does happen to them, nobody believes they
are speaking the truth. It seemed to me that that
was what had happened in this case. The police, I
gathered, merely believed that Mr. Rhodes was
making up this unconvincing tale in order to avert
suspicion from himself.
I asked if there had been any women staying by
themselves in the Hotel. It seems there were two
--a Mrs. Granby, an Anglo-Indian widow, and a
Miss Carruthers, rather a horsey spinster who
dropped her g's. Mr. Petherick added that the
most minute inquiries had failed to elicit anyone
who had seen either of them near the scene of the
crime and there was nothing to connect either of
them with it in any way. I asked him to describe
their personal appearance. He said that Mrs.
Granby had reddish hair rather untidily done, was
sallow-faced and about fifty years of age. Her
clothes were rather picturesque, being made
mostly of native silks, etc. Miss Carruthers was
about forty, wore pince-nez, had close-cropped