“I hope you won’t mind,” I stammered. “I may have been a little—er—personal now and then.”
“Oh! I comprehend perfectly; you have referred to me as comic—as, perhaps, ridiculous now and then? It matters not at all. Hastings, he also was not always polite. Me, I have the mind above such trivialities.”
Still somewhat doubtful, I rummaged in the drawers of my desk and produced an untidy pile of manuscript which I handed over to him. With an eye on possible publication in the future, I had divided the work into chapters, and the night before I had brought it up to date with an account of Miss Russell’s visit. Poirot had therefore twenty chapters.
I left him with them.
I was obliged to go out to a case at some distance away, and it was past eight o’clock when I got back, to be greeted with a plate of hot dinner on a tray, and the announcement that Poirot and my sister had supped together at half-past seven, and that the former had then gone to my workshop to finish his reading of the manuscript.
“I hope, James,” said my sister, “that you’ve been careful in what you say about me in it?”
My jaw dropped. I had not been careful at all.
“Not that it matters very much,” said Caroline, reading my expression correctly. “M. Poirot will know what to think. He understands me much better than you do.”
I went into the workshop. Poirot was sitting by the window. The manuscript lay neatly piled on a chair beside him. He laid his hand on it and spoke.
“Eh bien,” he said, “I congratulate you—on your modesty!”