“Well, the case is over, and I suppose you have added Barton and half a dozen others to the list of your admirers.”

She said with an accent of reproof.

“Of my friends, Frank. Miss Maggie has been most kind, and I must confess to feeling an interest in Valentine and Mr. Leigh. Joyce Rodney too. Do you know whether she has decided to stay on in Tilling Green?”

Frank nodded.

“I think so. If Miss Renie is certified, as she is bound to be, the administration of the estate falls to Joyce. She could live at the Cottage and carry on the school with Penelope Marsh as they had planned. It will really be much better if she does.”

“You have seen her?”

“Well, no-she called me up.”

It might have been his fancy, but he thought he detected a shade of benevolence in her expression. She said,

“I am afraid that I may have hurt her feelings by my decision that it would be inadvisable for me to call her Joyce, but now that the case is over-”

“There will hardly be any opportunity.”

“You think not?”

He met her slightly disappointed gaze with a laughing one. “It’s no good, my dear ma’am, I am a hopeless case. You will just have to make do with Jason and Valentine!”

Patricia Wentworth

Born in Mussoorie, India, in 1878, Patricia Wentworth was the daughter of an English general. Educated in England, she returned to India, where she began to write and was first published. She married, but in 1906 was left a widow with four children, and returned again to England where she resumed her writing, this time to earn a living for herself and her family. She married again in 1920 and lived in Surrey until her death in 1961.

Miss Wentworth’s early works were mainly historical fiction, and her first mystery, published in 1923, was The Astonishing Adventure of Jane Smith. In 1928 she wrote The Case Is Closed and gave birth to her most enduring creation, Miss Maud Silver.