Free Poison In The Pen by Patricia Wentworth

sprang up exulting because she had waked in time.
    She came on to the terrace and back through the door which she had left ajar. As she passed between the folds of pale brocade and drew them close behind her, the darkness in the room was like a solid wall. She couldn’t see to take a single step, she couldn’t see her hand before her face. She turned her head a little to the right and saw, cutting the darkness, one bright streak. The door into Scilla’s sitting-room was ajar and there was a light there.
    She moved towards it without thought or plan. It drew her and she went towards it. When she was about a yard away she stopped, because someone was speaking, there in the lighted room. It was Gilbert Earle, and what he said was, “Scilla, what is the use?”
    And Scilla laughed.
    It was a slow, lazy laugh. She said,
    “Darling, I wasn’t really thinking about things being useful.”
    They must have been very close together. The two voices came from the same place. If they were not in one another’s arms, the voices would not sound so close. He said with a kind of groan,
    “We’ve been over it all before.”
    “And you wouldn’t face it.” There was a light flavour of contempt in her voice.
    He sounded as if he had drawn back a little.
    “We always knew it couldn’t last.”
    “You always meant to eat your cake and have it, didn’t you, darling? In fact, to put it bluntly, you always meant to have Valentine’s money.”
    “I’m very fond of her.”
    “But just a little fonder of the money.”
    “You’ve no right to say a thing like that! I couldn’t afford to marry a girl who hadn’t something of her own.”
    “You couldn’t afford to marry me?”
    “My dear girl, there’s no question of my marrying you.”
    She said quite softly and sweetly,
    “Roger would divorce me—if he knew.”
    It had all passed too quickly for Valentine’s thought to take hold of it. There was a shattering sense of shock. She turned round and groped her way towards the other door. Her outstretched hands touched nothing until she came to it. She had made no sound, and she had not stumbled.
    She passed through the hall and up the stairs to her own room.
    CHAPTER 10
    After Miss Silver had brushed her hair and arranged it for the night, plaiting and controlling it with a stronger net than the one which she used by day, it was her invariable practice to read a chapter from the Bible before putting out the light and composing herself to sleep. Tonight, sitting up in her warm blue dressing-gown with the hand-made crochet trimming which had already done good service upon two earlier gowns, she read with edification in the book of Proverbs and the sixth chapter. Passing from a recommendation to avoid becoming surety for a stranger and the advice given to the sluggard to consider the industry of the ant, in both of which she wholeheartedly concurred, she came to the description of the man who sowed discord, and the inclusion amongst things hated by the Lord of—
    “A lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood,
    An heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief,
    A false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren.”
    This seemed to her to have so direct a bearing upon the situation in Tilling Green that it engaged her very particular attention. Whether these were the reflections of Solomon or not, how strong a searchlight they turned upon the darker recesses of the human mind, and what age-old wisdom they displayed. It was some time before she closed the book and addressed herself to her devotions.
    When they were completed, she took off the dressing-gown and laid it across her folded clothes, after which she put out the light, drew back the curtains, and opened the farther of the two windows, reflecting as she did so how habits had changed in this direction. Her grandmother would never have dreamed of allowing the night air into a bedroom except during a period