Free Absent in the Spring by Agatha writing as Mary Westmacott Christie

her, to think of their lives before her own.
    But Leslie had been quite unyielding and Rodney had washed his hands of the whole matter. He supposed, he had said with a sigh, that Mrs Sherston knew her own business best. Certainly, Joan thought, she was an obstinate creature.
    Walking restlessly up and down the rest house floor, Joan remembered Leslie Sherston as she had looked that day sitting on Asheldown Ridge.
    Sitting hunched forward, her elbows on her knees, her chin supported on her hands. Sitting curiously still. Looking out across the farmland and the plough to where slopes of oaks and beeches in Little Havering wood were turning golden red.
    She and Rodney sitting there – so quiet – so motionless – staring in front of them.
    Quite why she did not speak to them, or join them, Joan hardly knew.
    Perhaps it was the guilty consciousness of her suspicions of Myrna Randolph?
    Anyhow she had not spoken to them. Instead she had gone quietly back into the shelter of the trees and had taken her way home. It was an incident that she had never liked very much to think about – and she had certainly never mentioned it to Rodney. He might think she had ideas in her head, ideas about him and Myrna Randolph.
    Rodney walking up the platform at Victoria …
    Oh goodness, surely she wasn’t going to begin that all over again?
    What on earth had put that extraordinary notion into her head? That Rodney (who was and always had been devoted to her) was enjoying the prospect of her absence?
    As though you could tell anything by the way a man walked!
    She would simply put the whole ridiculous fancy out of her mind.
    She wouldn’t think any more about Rodney, not if it made her imagine such curious and unpleasant things.
    Up to now, she’d never been a fanciful woman.
    It must be the sun.

Chapter Five
    The afternoon and evening passed with interminable slowness.
    Joan didn’t like to go out in the sun again until it was quite low in the sky. So she sat in the rest house.
    After about half an hour she felt it unendurable to sit still in a chair. She went into the bedroom and began to unpack her cases and repack them. Her things, so she told herself, were not properly folded. She might as well make a good job of it.
    She finished the job neatly and expeditiously. It was five o’clock. She might safely go out now surely. It was so depressing in the rest house. If only she had something to read …
    Or even, thought Joan desperately, a wire puzzle!
    Outside she looked with distaste at the tins and the hens and the barbed wire. What a horrible place this was. Utterly horrible.
    She walked, for a change, in a direction parallel with the railway line and the Turkish frontier. It gave her a feeling of agreeable novelty. But after a quarter of an hour the effect was the same. The railway line, running a quarter of a mile to her right, gave her no feeling of companionship.
    Nothing but silence – silence and sunlight.
    It occurred to Joan that she might recite poetry. She had always been supposed as a girl to recite and read poetry very well. Interesting to see what she could remember after all these years. There was a time when she had known quite a lot of poetry by heart.
    The quality of mercy is not strained,
    It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
    What came next? Stupid. She simply couldn’t remember.
    Fear no more the heat of the sun
    (That began comfortingly anyway! Now how did it go on?)
    Nor the furious winter’s rages
    Thou thy worldly task has done
    Home art gone and ta’en thy wages
    Golden lads and girls all must
    As chimney sweepers come to dust .
    No, not very cheerful on the whole. Could she remember any of the sonnets? She used to know them. The marriage of true minds and that one that Rodney had asked her about.
    Funny the way he had said suddenly one evening:
    â€˜ And thy eternal summer shall not fade – that’s from Shakespeare, isn’t