魔手39

VII

Upstairs I sat by Megan’s bed waiting for her to come round and occasion-ally cursing Nash.

“How do you know she’s all right? It was too big a risk.”

Nash was very soothing.

“Just a soporific in the milk she always had by her bed. Nothing more. Itstands to reason, he couldn’t risk her being poisoned. As far as he’s con-cerned the whole business is closed with Miss Griffith’s arrest. He can’t af-ford to have any mysterious death. No violence, no poison. But if a ratherunhappy type of girl broods over her mother’s suicide, and finally goesand puts her head in the gas oven—well, people just say that she wasnever quite normal and the shock of her mother’s death finished her.”

I said, watching Megan:

“She’s a long time coming round.”

“You heard what Dr. Griffith said? Heart and pulse quite all right—she’lljust sleep and wake naturally. Stuff he gives a lot of his patients, he says.”

Megan stirred. She murmured something.

Superintendent Nash unobtrusively left the room.

Presently Megan opened her eyes. “Jerry.”

“Hallo, sweet.”

“Did I do it well?”

“You might have been blackmailing ever since your cradle!”

Megan closed her eyes again. Then she murmured:

“Last night—I was writing to you—in case anything went—went wrong.

But I was too sleepy to finish. It’s over there.”

I went across to the writing- table. In a shabby little blotter I foundMegan’s unfinished letter.

“My dear Jerry,” it began primly:

“I was reading my school Shakespeare and the sonnet that begins:

‘So are you to my thoughts as food to life

Or as sweet-season’d showers are to the ground.’

and I see that I am in love with you after all, because that is what I feel….”

 

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