The Terriford mystery

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

Yours very truly,

Mary Faring.

Terrible things said about Jean and himself? This was a far greater, a more agonizing, blow, than anything he had yet experienced.

He walked into his room and, careless of possible interruption, sat down and buried his head in his hands.

Jean—the subject of low, coarse gossip? Jean—the subject of odious innuendo?

He started up and began walking up and down the room. The fearful ordeal of last night, the horror attendant on his recent hideous progress through the High Street—everything was forgotten in the news conveyed in Mrs. Faring’s letter.

Garlett was a proud and sensitive man. He had put aside, as he would have done a noxious sight or smell, those half questions put to him by James Kentworthy, the detective, concerning his relationship with Jean Bower. But now the memory of those questions, those veiled insinuations, came back, and with that memory the agonized realization that Jean Bower had been even then suspected as providing the motive for an otherwise motiveless crime.

But, fortunately for most of us at some time of our lives, work has to be done—whatever betide. So at last the unhappy man sat down and began the tedious task of answering with his own hand the letters which otherwise he would have dictated. As he did so, he found himself, for the first time in his life, struggling with two distinct currents of thought—the one superficial, concerning the letters he was writing; the other still passionately concerned with the news contained in Mrs. Faring’s letter. In vain he now tried to assure himself that his and Jean’s ordeal was bound to be a short one, and that once the Government analyst’s report was published he would be able to take up life again exactly as it had been.

Well he knew, now, that life could never be the same again. If he remained at Terriford he realized that even if he lived to be a very old man, there would always be somebody ready to point him out as the man who had been suspected of having murdered his first wife for love of the woman who had become his second.

Though he had arrived very late at the factory, he had never spent a morning there which seemed so long and dreary. None of his usual business associates came in to see him, no one even rang him up on the telephone. It was as though a desert had been created round about him, and bitterly he felt the humiliation, the degradation, of it all.