Aunt Ellen was rich; Aunt Ellen was a miser. She kept her money in a trunk in the bedroom, and counted it by candlelight. So they said. She was too mean to buy cow’s milk and kept a goat in the garden.

The goat and Cousing Hilda were Aunt Ellen’s only extravagances. Cousing Hilda had lived in the cottage with Aunt Ellen for twelve years. Cousing Hilda milked the goat, fetched the water from the well, sifted the cinders, and didn’t eat enough to stretch a mouse-skin. They said she’d get it all back one day. She was only forty-two. The money would come to Hilda in the end. She was the only relation, so they said in the village until Jeremy turned up.

Jeremy was a flabby little man in his forties; some kind of nephew. He had come from distant parts; he was asked in; he stayed the night; then he stayed on. They said Aunt Ellen was nervous about burglars and she had worked out he would be cheaper than a dog to feed.

Everything about the cottage pleased him. He lounged in the brutally hard chairs; basked by the tiny fire that burned dubiously in the grate; participated eagerly in the ceremony of tea.

Aunt Ellen always made the tea with her own careful hands. At this meal there was only plenty of bread, and a little cube of margarine on each plate.

On Sunday there was cake for tea. Aunt Ellen made this too, for who else could be trusted with the sugar? She was skilled at omitting the usual ingredients. A little fat and sugar, a cupful of goat’s milk, a great deal of flour and baking powder and sometimes a few caraway seeds — this was Aunt Ellen’s cake.

She always took a little walk before trea, shuffling, secret and cunning as far as the woods, her head sunk in her greasy coat, purple streaks of leg bulging from her wrecked stockings, shoes flapping from her feet. Little Jeremy trotted round her, his face sharp with cold, and lean Cousing Hilda marched behind. They returned to the cottage shaken with hunger, then Aunt Ellen ate her own cake greedily. Jeremy said the cake was delicious. Cousin Hilda, suddenly, outrageously, spat it on the plate.

There was a row, one of those rows woken have that are never forgiven, athen she rushed out of the house.

She went as housemaid to the doctor. It was a comfortable job, but thirty years ago she had worn silk dresses and gone to dancing classes. She had something to think about as she polished the consulting-room floor.

It was Cousing Hilda who answered the door when the news came at last one Monday morning. It had to be admitted she gave the message at once, but when the doctor called Aunt Ellen was already dead, and Jeremy was being sick.

The doctor sent for the police. The village constable came first, then an inspector and his team. Ugly words about arsenic were exchanged, and the constable provided the local gossip.

Jeremy, pale and emptied but no longer sick, was able to give frightened answers. They hadn’t eaten anything queer, only tea, and he hadn’t eaten much of that owing to loss of appetite, he said, with an outburst of the coughing that had taken him more than once to the doctor’s surgery.

The tea-table didn’t show much. There was a thin slice of half-eaten cake on Jeremy’s plate. There were only crumbs on Aunt Ellen’s plate. Cousing Hilda was sent for. Jeremy was already cringing. He was the only heir. Ie he hadn’t been alive they’d never have suspected him. He raised his weak, hopeful eyes to Hilda, begging for help.

THe police also wanted her help. The would like to hear her account of Aunt Ellen’s Sunday routine.

She spoke slowly, in a puzzled voice, as though she was trying to fit Jeremy into a picture that she seemed to see on the tea-table. She bent forward and peered at the cake more than once. Then she turned on Jeremy.

“Aunt Ellen didn’t make that cake,” she said in a flat, stiff voice. “But she always did. You know she did,” Jeremy said weakly.

Everyone waited for what this suddenly terrible, this at last triumphant, woman was going to prove.

She waved her hand and they stared obediently at the cake. It was an ordinary sort of yellow cake. A piece had been cut from it for analysis.

“That cake’s a good cake,” Cousin Hilda shouted. “You can see it. You ask anyone. That cake’s got eggs in it. She never put an egg in a cake. Did you make it, Jeremy?”

“Aunt Ellen made it”.

“To poison herself?” Hilda demanded. “That’s likely.”

“I never made a cake in my life,” Jeremy said, cowering.

“You used a cookery book, That would say eggs, wouldn’t it? What else did you put in?”

It was the village constable who stopped her apologetically at the door.

“It´s true enough, sir,” he said hesitantly to the inspector, “that Aunt—that she would never put an egg in a cake. But she was meaner than that. They say she had never bought an egg in her life. If the cake was cooked in this house, sir, where did the eggs come from? Anyway, we haven’t found any eggshels, have we?”

That was when Cousin Hilda screamed and tried to run from the house. There was nowhere to run, but she died before the case came up, poor thing.

It was a clear enough case. She always baked for the doctor on Sundays. She had borrowed some white powder from the dispensary for the last cake, the cake she had changed for Aunt Ellen’s when the old lady was out walking.

There was only one egg in it, anyway. It wasn’t, they said, a very good cake.