But when we were lunching with Judge Nathaniel Whitney at a quarter past one, we naturally didn’t know that Elsie Phelps was dead, and I may say the conversation would have been very different if we had. If we had, that is, and there’d still been a lunch.
We were supposed to be at the house at one o’clock, but after I’d told Colonel Primrose about Elsie and the special-delivery letter, and about the scene Abigail had put on, I was too involved to stop. Or rather, I suppose, I’d given Colonel Primrose a lever to pry the rest of it out with. I can see now that I was put through a third degree—the rubber-hose-in-the-velvet-stocking sort of thing—and it’s a wonder to me that I managed to hold out as much as I did. The handkerchief with W. Thornton Martin’s monogram on it, not Monckton Tyler W
