Miss Silver knew trouble when she saw it, and she saw it now. The reddened eyelids spoke of lack of sleep. She said in her kindest voice,

“I know that everyone has felt the deepest sympathy with you in your loss.”

Miss Pell’s lips trembled.

“Everyone has been very kind,” she said. “But it doesn’t bring her back. If it hadn’t been for those letters-”

She didn’t know what made her speak of the letters. She had been asked about them at the inquest, but ever since she had tried to keep them out of her mind. Wicked, that’s what they were, and not fit language for a Christian woman to call to mind. And Doris always such a good girl. She felt her way to a chair and sat down because her legs were shaking. Her thought found its way into words.

“She was always such a good girl. None of the things in the letters were true. She was a good Christian girl.”

Miss Silver had sat down too.

“I am sure she was, Miss Pell. If the person who wrote those letters could be found, it might save some other poor girl the same experience.”

Miss Pell stared at her.

“Anyone that was wicked enough to write those letters would be wicked enough to know how to hide themselves.”

“Do you think that your niece had any idea who had written them?”

Miss Pell’s hands, which were lying in her lap, jerked and closed down, the right hand over the left.

“There wasn’t anything to say who wrote them.”

“If she had had any idea, in whom would she have been most likely to confide?”

“She hadn’t any secrets from me.”

“Sometimes a girl will talk to another girl. Had your niece any special friend? Was she, for instance, friendly with Connie Brooke?”

Miss Pell looked down at her own clasped hands.

“They had known each other from children,” she said. “Miss Renie will have told you I was maid to Miss Valentine’s mother, Mrs. Grey-and a sweet lady she was if ever there was one. When my brother died and I had to take Doris, Mrs. Grey let me bring her to the Manor. And just about then Mrs. Brooke and her little Connie came to Tilling Green, so there were two little girls very much of an age, and Miss Valentine was the baby.”

“And they went on being friendly?”

“Really fond of each other, that’s what they were. The very last bit of work Doris did was to alter a dress for Miss Connie. And she must have been one of the last people she spoke to too, because that was one of the things she went out for that afternoon, to go along to the school and let Miss Connie have her dress.”

Miss Silver looked at her gravely.

“Miss Pell, you knew, did you not, that Connie Brooke was believed to have told Mr. Martin that she knew who had written those letters?”

“It wasn’t Mr. Martin who said so.”

“No, it was his housekeeper. It was all over the village that Connie Brooke knew about the letters, and that Mr. Martin had told her that it might be her duty to go to the police. Do you not think it would have been her duty?”

“I couldn’t say.”

Miss Silver waited for a moment. Then she said,

“Connie died next day, as suddenly as your niece did. If she had told Mr. Martin what she knew, I believe that she would be alive to-day. It was all over the village on Saturday that Colonel Repton had been heard to say that he knew who had written the letters. On Monday afternoon he was dead too. If he had told the police what he knew, he would not have died. Now, Miss Pell, I think that you know something, and I think it is of the first importance that you should tell what you know.”

A little colour came up into the sallow face. The eyelids came down for a moment over the faded eyes, and then were raised again. In a changed voice Miss Pell said,

“It is the third sign-”

“Yes, Miss Pell?”

“Once by a dream,” said Miss Pell, looking fixedly at her, “and once by the Bible text, and once by your mouth. If there was a third sign, I said that I would know what I had to do.”

If the words were strange, her manner was perfectly composed. Her hands now held each other lightly and without straining. Miss Silver said,

“There is something you know and that you think you ought to tell?”

The answer she received was an indirect one.

“I will tell you about the signs. You won’t understand unless I tell you about them. Because when Doris came home that day I promised her that I wouldn’t speak of what she told me, and it isn’t right to break a promise to the dead- not unless there is a sign, and I’ve had three. She said to me, ‘You’ll never tell, Aunt Emily, now will you?’ And I said, ‘Of course I won’t.’ Nor I wouldn’t ever, if it hadn’t been for the signs.”

“What were they, Miss Pell?”

“The first was a dream that I had in the night. Last night it was, and as clear as if I was waking. I was here in this room and sewing on something black, and I was crying over the work, and I remember thinking that it would be spoiled, because nothing spots quicker than black. And then the door opened and Doris and Connie came in together, holding hands like they would when they were little girls. They had a big bunch of flowers between them, holding it-lilies, and roses, and all sorts. And there was a light all round them, so that they shone. Doris was on the right and Connie on the left. In my dream they came right up to me, and Doris said not to cry any more, because there was no need, and not to trouble about the promise I’d made, because it didn’t matter. And I woke up in my bed upstairs with the alarm clock going.”

Miss Silver said very kindly indeed,

“It was a comforting dream.”

Miss Pell’s eyes were full of tears.

“It ought to have been, but it wasn’t. I’d heard about Colonel Repton, and I kept troubling in my mind about whether the dream meant that I was to break my promise and go to the police, and whether it was a sign, or whether it had just come up out of my troubling about what I had said to the police. I hadn’t told any lies-I wouldn’t do that-but when they asked me if I had told them all I knew, I just put my handkerchief up to my face and cried, and they thought that I had.”

“I see.”

“So I thought what I could do to make sure about the sign. And what I did, I took my Bible and I shut my eyes and opened it just where it fared to open and put my finger on a verse. And when I opened my eyes it was the sixteenth verse of the eighth chapter of Zechariah, and it said-‘These are the things that ye shall do; Speak ye every man the truth to his neighbour; execute the judgment of truth and peace in your gates.’ So I thought, ‘If that isn’t a sign, I don’t know what is.’ And then it come over me that I’d never broke a promise in my life, and that I’d got to be sure. And I thought, ‘If the Lord wants me to speak, he can send me a third sign just as well as the other two, and if there is a third sign, I shall know that it’s from the Lord and I shall know what I’ve got to do.’ And then you come knocking at the door, a stranger, and the very words of the sign in your mouth, telling me that there was something I knew, and that I should tell it.”

Miss Silver repeated the words.

“Yes, I think you should tell it.”

Miss Pell brought out an old-fashioned linen handkerchief neatly folded and touched her eyes with it.

“It was that last day before Doris was drowned. She went out in the afternoon, and she’d got a mauve silk blouse she was taking to Miss Maggie at the Manor, and a dress she’d made for Miss Wayne, a blue wool that she had, coming out of mourning for her sister, and she said it was a little tight under the arms though I couldn’t see it myself, so Doris had been letting it out. Quite a round she had, what with leaving the blouse, and the dress, and looking in to settle the pattern of a couple of nightdresses for Miss Eccles and finishing up with Miss Connie. She left the dress she had been altering for her to the end because of the children not coming out of school until four. Well, she went there, and she was properly upset, the same as she was when she came back home. And at first she wouldn’t tell me anything at all, only that there was something not quite right about the neck of Miss Maggie’s blouse and she’d promised to alter it quick and run up with it in the evening. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you’re not letting yourself get upset about that, are you?’ And she said, ‘No, Aunt Emily, it isn’t the blouse,’ and she burst out crying. So then I went on at her to tell me what it was, and she said if she did, would I promise faithfully never to breathe it to a living soul-and I promised. So then she told me.”