Murder is Easy by Agatha Christie

on toward the looming mass of Ashe Ridge, “I like that girl. She's much too good for Thomas - a cool, superior devil like that.”
    A memory of the doctor's last smile on the doorstep recurred to him. Decidedly smug, it had been! Complacent!
    The sound of footsteps a little way ahead roused Luke from his slightly irritable meditations. He looked up to see young Mr. Ellsworthy coming down the path from the hillside. His eyes were on the ground and he was smiling to himself. His expression struck Luke disagreeably. Ellsworthy was not so much walking as prancing - like a man who keeps time to some devilish little jig running in his brain. His smile was a strange secret contortion of the lips; it had a gleeful slyness that was definitely unpleasant. Luke had stopped and Ellsworthy was nearly abreast of him when he at last looked up. His eyes, malicious and dancing, met the other man's for just a minute before recognition came. Then - or so it seemed to Luke - a complete change came over the man. Where, a minute before, there had been the suggestion of a dancing satyr, there was now a somewhat priggish young man. “Oh, Mr. Fitzwilliam, good morning.”
    “Good morning,” said Luke. “Have you been admiring the beauties of Nature?”
    Mr. Ellsworthy's long pale hands flew up in a reproving gesture. “Oh, no, no. I abhor Nature. But I do enjoy life, Mr. Fitzwilliam.”
    “So do I,” said Luke.
    “Mens sana in corpore sano,” said Mr. Ellsworthy. His tone was delicately ironic.
    “I'm sure that's so true of you.”
    “There are worse things,” said Luke. “My dear fellow! Sanity is the one unbelievable bore. One must be mad, slightly twisted - then one sees life from a new and entrancing angle.”
    “The leper's squint,” suggested Luke.
    “Oh, very good, very good; quite witty! But there's something in it, you know. An interesting angle of vision. But I mustn't detain you. You're having exercise. One must have exercise - the public-school spirit!”
    “As you say,” said Luke, and, with a curt nod, walked on. He thought, “I'm getting too darned imaginative. The fellow's just an ass, that's all.” But some indefinable uneasiness drove his feet on faster. That queer, sly, triumphant smile that Ellsworthy had had on his face - was that just imagination on his, Luke's, part? And his subsequent impression that it had been wiped off, as though by a sponge, the moment the other man caught sight of Luke coming toward him - what of that? And with quickening uneasiness he thought, “Bridget? Is she all right? They came up here together and he came back alone.”
    He hurried on. The sun had come out while he was talking to Rose Humbleby. Now it had gone in again. The sky was dull and menacing, and wind came in sudden erratic little puffs. It was as though he had stepped out of normal everyday life into that queer half world of enchantment, the consciousness of which had enveloped him ever since he came to Wychwood. He turned a corner and came out on the flat ledge of green grass that had been pointed out to him from below, and which went, he knew, by the name of Witches' Meadow. It was here, so tradition had it, that the witches had held revelry on Walpurgis Night and Halloween.
    And then a quick wave of relief swept over him. Bridget was here. She sat with her back against a rock on the hillside. She was sitting bent over, her head in her hands. He walked quickly over to her. Lovely spring turf, strangely green and fresh. He said, “Bridget?”
    Slowly she raised her face from her hands. Her face troubled him. She looked as though she were returning from some far-off world, as though she had difficulty in adjusting herself to the world of now and here.
    Luke said, rather inadequately, “I say, you're - you're all right, aren't you?”
    It was a minute or two before she answered - as though she still had not quite come back from that far-off world that had held her. Luke felt that his words had to travel a long way