been so different, cold and strange, and now this long silence. It makes me afraid. If you were to stop loving me! But that’s impossible—what a silly kid I am—always imagining things! But if you did stop loving me, I don’t know what I should do—kill myself perhaps! I couldn’t live without you. Sometimes I fancy another woman is coming between us. Let her look out, that’s all—and you too! I’d as soon kill you as let her have you! I mean it.
“But there, I’m writing high-flown nonsense. You love me, and I love you—yes, love you, love you, love you!
“BELLA.”
There was no address or date. Poirot handed it back with a grave face.
“And the assumption is, M. le juge—?”
The examining magistrate shrugged his shoulders.
“Obviously M. Renauld was entangled with this Englishwoman—Bella. He comes over here, meets Madame Daubreuil, and starts an intrigue with her. He cools off to the other, and she instantly suspects something. This letter contains a distinct threat. M. Poirot, at first sight the case seemed simplicity itself. Jealousy! The fact that M. Renauld was stabbed in the back seemed to point distinctly to its being a woman’s crime.”
Poirot nodded.
“The stab in the back, yes—but not the grave! That was laborious work, hard work—no woman dug that grave, monsieur. That was a man’s doing.”
The commissary exclaimed excitedly: “Yes, yes, you are right. We did not think of that.”
“As I said,” continued M. Hautet, “at first sight the case seemed simple, but the masked men, and the letter you received from M. Renauld complicate matters. Here we seem to have an entirely different set of circumstances, with no relationship between the two. As re-
