As Harry Garlett repeated the word his face became deeply, deeply troubled. “She seemed so well, for her, last evening,” he said slowly.
The doctor answered in a low voice: “You should have resisted her wish for those strawberries.”
Harry Garlett looked puzzled.
“I never gave her any strawberries, Maclean. There are no strawberries yet—it’s much too early.”
It was the doctor’s turn to be surprised.
“I understood from Miss Cheale that you had shown your wife a dish of forced strawberries brought her by Miss Prince, and that then she had insisted on having them before her supper.”
“I never saw any strawberries, and I was only with her for a very few minutes.”
“Then one of the maids must have given them to her,” observed the doctor. “But if it hadn’t been that dish of strawberries, it would have been something else. It’s clear from the state she was in that anything might have caused her death.”
As if hardly knowing what he was doing, Harry Garlett sat down again.
“I—I can’t believe it,” he muttered.