A few incidents give us an insight into the kind of person Agatha was. One such incident occurred while Agatha was in Cauterets. Frederick and Madge (Agatha’s sister) made quite a few excursions on horseback. Agatha implored to be allowed to accompany them and one day, permission was granted. The services of a guide were recruited to see to that Agatha did not fall off or hurt herself. The guide tried to keep Agatha amused by picking little bunches of flowers to stick on her hatband. When they stopped for lunch, the guide enthusiastically brought a butterfly for the ‘mademoiselle’. With a pin, he fixed the butterfly onto Agatha’s hat. Agatha was horrified. She felt the agony of the fluttering butterfly struggling against the pin. She desperately wanted to release it from its misery and yet, she could not possibly hurt the feelings of the guide by taking it off ! Not knowing how to handle the situation, Agatha started crying. Her father and sister tried to find the reason for this flow of tears, but the more they tried, the more she wept. The upset and annoyed party finally turned back. Her father crossly told her mother that Agatha had been crying since lunchtime and had not eaten anything. It was her mother who realized that Agatha did not like the butterfly. A relieved Agatha, released from the bondage of silence flung herself at her mother and hugged her hard. She confessed, "Yes, yes, yes. It’s been flapping. It’s been flapping. But he was so kind and he meant to be kind. I couldn’t say." And suddenly the whole thing receded into the distance.

Another incident occurred while Agatha was working in a dispensary during her first aid and nursing classes. Mixing medicines according to the doctor’s prescription, she was naturally nervous about making mistakes. Although the addition of poison was always checked by one of the other dispensers, there were always some frightening moments. Once while making ointment, Agatha had placed a little carbolic in pure form in an ointment pot lid and was gradually and carefully mixing it to the ointment she was making. Once it was made, packed and labeled, she went on with her other work. In the middle of the night, she suddenly woke up. She could not remember whether she had washed the pot lid in which she had taken out the carbolic. The more she thought about it, the more certain she became that she had put the lid on an ointment pot, without realizing that there was anything in it. She had frightening visions of the ward boy collecting the prepared ointments in the morning and one of the unsuspecting patients would have an ointment layered with pure carbolic. Unable to bear the tension, Agatha got out of the bed and went to the dispensary. She sniffed all the ointments, detected a faint odor of carbolic, imagined or otherwise, in one of them, and removed the top layer of the ointment. Only then was she able to get some sleep.

It stopped suddenly, when a member of the staff of the Hydro Hotel at Harrogate claimed the £ 100 reward. Agatha had arrived nine days ago, in a taxicab. She had been staying there since. The other guests were convinced that she had lost her memory, as all her actions and behavior were quite normal. Later on both Archie and Agatha refused to make any further statements. Perhaps Ritchie Calder of the New Statesman put it very aptly at a more recent date – "In retrospect, it is difficult to decide who were most responsible, the police or the press, for a ‘missing person’ enquiry being blown up into the sensation of the century."

Perhaps Hercule Poirot might have expressed it the best – "you are suggesting, my dear Hastings, that it was what you might term a publicity stunt. Yes ? But consider two points – first that the lady had, by that time, not the slightest need for publicity. She had a full measure of it already. Secondly a more important point, which must always be considered in matters of this sort – the known character of the suspect. Can you really visualize a lady of genuine modesty, with a retiring disposition and an extreme dislike of public intervention in her affairs deliberately making herself the centre of a cause celebre and bringing down on herself the countrywide attention of the sensational press ? If you have no better solution to offer than that, mon cher Hastings, I suggest that, you keep silent." - at which, Hastings retired abashed.

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