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Updated: June 22, 2025
"No," she exclaimed, "stay as you are, kneeling." She went over to the fire-place, took the whip from the mantle-piece, and, watching me with a smile, let it hiss through the air; then she slowly rolled up the sleeve of her fur-jacket. "Marvellous woman!" I exclaimed. "Silence, slave!" She suddenly scowled, looked savage, and struck me with the whip.
Colonel Hawkes brought up old scenes and memories which are best forgotten. Your music has always a soothing effect on me. I took my violin up, and leaning against the mantle-piece opposite to her, I began to play in the firelight. I played, as I loved to play, without notes before me, and soon I was in a dream myself.
About an hour after the discovery of the loss of my husband's coat, I went quietly down into the parlor, and taking from the mantle-piece the china vases, worth, probably, a dollar for the pair, concealed them under my apron, lest any one should see what I had; and, returning up stairs, hid them away in a dark closet, where they have ever since remained.
The drawing-room, fourteen feet by ten, was fitted up as a ballroom, with two fiddlers and a fifer sitting in a corner and a country-dance was performing when we arrived. Over the mantle-piece was a square of laurel twigs, inclosing as a frame this couplet from the poetical brain of the master of the house, cut out in red paper, and bespangled with blue and yellow tinsel
A mantle-piece, with two modern Sevres vases, a timepiece representing Cupid with his bent bow, a mirror with an engraving on each side one representing Homer carrying his guide, the other, Belisarius begging a grayish paper; red and black tapestry such was the appearance of Lord Wilmore's drawing-room.
For a while I sat opposite the mantle-piece, looking at the vases but, not admiringly; then I left the parlor, and went about my household duties, but, with a pressure on my feelings. I was far, very far from being satisfied with myself. About an hour afterwards my husband came home. I did not take him into the parlor to show him my little purchase, for, I had no heart to do so.
It was of a vast size; and even when the Squire had lit the candles upon the mantle-piece, and those which clustered on either side of the great pier-glass, the darkness did but give place to a sort of shining gloom: the cause of this strange effect was the peculiarity of the furniture; the walls were of bog-oak, relieved, like those of a ball-room, by silver sconces; the chairs were of the same material.
"In a moment, he has torn the letter into long thin strips, and rolling them up into spills he thrusts them hurriedly in amongst the other spills in the vase on the mantle-piece." I uttered an exclamation. "No one would think of looking there," Poirot continued. "And he will be able, at his leisure, to come back and destroy this solitary piece of evidence against him."
Now and then Jane Chester would lift her eyes to the clock, which, with a tiny looking-glass, framed in the mahogany beneath its dial, stood directly before her upon the mantle-piece.
Over the mantle-piece were branches of pretty white sperm candles, whose light fell softly on the heavy red curtains and the roses in the carpet, and danced in the eyes of the happy children. They, the children, had been having a "splendid time."
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