Once before I had been struck by the remnants of beauty in the housekeeper’s face. This morning I was struck anew. Very simply dressed in black, tall, upright and independent as ever, with her big dark eyes and an unwonted flush of colour in her usually pale cheeks, I realized that as a girl she must have been startlingly handsome.
“Good morning, mademoiselle,” said Poirot. “Will you be seated? Dr. Sheppard is so kind as to permit me the use of his surgery for a little conversation I am anxious to have with you.”
Miss Russell sat down with her usual composure. If she felt any inward agitation, it did not display itself in any outward manifestation.
“It seems a queer way of doing things, if you’ll allow me to say so,” she remarked.
“Miss Russell—I have news to give you.”
“Indeed!”
“Charles Kent has been arrested at Liverpool.”
Not a muscle of her face moved. She merely opened her eyes a trifle wider, and asked, with a tinge of defiance: “Well, what of it?”
But at that moment it came to me—the resemblance that had haunted me all along, something familiar in the defiance of Charles Kent’s manner. The two voices, one rough and coarse, the other painfully ladylike—were strangely the same in timbre. It was of Miss Russell that I had been reminded that night outside the gates of Fernly Park.