“It is that you have really the love of the machinery,” he said, after inspecting the debris of my labours.

Every man has his hobby. I immediately drew Poirot’s attention to my homemade wireless. Finding him sympathetic, I showed him one or two little inventions of my own⁠—trifling things, but useful in the house.

“Decidedly,” said Poirot, “you should be an inventor by trade, not a doctor. But I hear the bell⁠—that is your patient. Let us go into the surgery.”

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.