Patricia Wentworth - Out of the Past

He laughed.

“It always is! As I started off by saying, quite a number of people have cause to be very grateful that you found it so. Hardwick might just have gone on holding his tongue-”

Miss Silver shook her head.

“He would not have allowed an innocent person to be arrested.”

“Well, you know, the beautiful Adela had a very strong pull-old family friend-guest in his house-Personage with a capital P. And against all that-well, when you come to sort it out, nothing but a fairly strong suspicion. She might have put up the same story as Pippa Maybury-said she had come down to meet him and found him dead. As a matter of fact I can’t think why she didn’t.”

Miss Silver coughed.

“And why not?”

“Oh, no, she would not do that.”

“She would never have made such an admission. You must remember that she was, as you have said, a personage. In one way and another her name has been before the public for thirty years, and there has never been a whisper against her character. She had a good deal of aristocratic pride, and she would, I am sure, have preferred her own death, or that of anyone else, to having it supposed that she had made a secret assignation with Mr. Field. I am, in fact, reminded of the well known lines in which Lord Tennyson, speaking of Sir Lancelot, says:

The circumstances, of course, are not the same, but there is a certain similarity which I find suggestive.”

He watched her through half closed lids. This was Maudie in essence. The Victorian Standard Applied. The Moral Pointed. Penetrating Analysis of Character. And all served up with the true Tennysonian garnish. His respect for her was immense, his enjoyment perennial. He came reluctantly to his feet and kissed her hand.

“Madam, your most devoted! Till our next crime!”

She looked at him between affection and reproof.

“My dear Frank!”

Born in Mussoorie, India, in 1878, Patricia Wentworth was the daughter of an English general. Educated in England, she returned to India, where she began to write and was first published. She married, but in 1906 was left a widow with four children, and returned again to England where she resumed her writing, this time to earn a living for herself and her family. She married again in 1920 and lived in Surrey until her death in 1961.

Miss Wentworth’s early works were mainly historical fiction, and her first mystery, published in 1923, was The Astonishing Adventure of Jane Smith. In 1928 she wrote The Case Is Closed and gave birth to her most enduring creation, Miss Maud Silver.