Nemesis by Agatha Christie Page A

speed ahead with a gardening conversation of some technicality. Miss Cooke responded. Miss Barrow put in an occasional remark.
    Mr Caspar relapsed into smiling silence.
    Later, as Miss Marple took her usual rest before dinner, she conned over what she had collected. Miss Cooke had admitted being in St Mary Mead. She had admitted walking past Miss Marple's house. Had agreed it was quite a coincidence. Coincidence? thought Miss Marple meditatively, turning the word over in her mouth rather as a child might do to a certain lollipop to decide its flavour. Was it a coincidence? Or had she had some reason to come there? Had she been sent there? Sent there for what reason? Was that a ridiculous thing to imagine?
    “Any coincidence,” said Miss Marple to herself, “is always worth noticing. You can throw it away later if it is only a coincidence.”
    Miss Cooke and Miss Barrow appeared to be a perfectly normal pair of friends doing the kind of tour, which according to them, they did every year. They had been on an Hellenic cruise last year and a tour of bulbs in Holland the year before, and Northern Ireland the year before that. They seemed perfectly pleasant and ordinary people. But Miss Cooke, she thought, had for a moment looked as though she were about to disclaim her visit to St Mary Mead. She had looked at her friend, Miss Barrow, rather as though she were seeking instruction as to what to say. Miss Barrow was presumably the senior partner..."
    “Of course, really, I may have been imagining all these things,” thought Miss Marple. “They may have no significance whatever.”
    The word danger came unexpectedly into her mind. Used by Mr Rafiel in his first letter , and there had been some reference to her needing a guardian angel in his second letter. Was she going into danger in this business? and why? From whom?
    Surely not from Miss Cooke and Miss Barrow. Such an ordinary-looking couple. All the same Miss Cooke had dyed her hair and altered her style of hairdressing. Disguised her appearance as much as she could, in fact. Which was odd, to say the least of it! She considered once more her fellow travellers.
    Mr Caspar, now, it would have been much easier to imagine that he might be dangerous. Did he understand more English than he pretended to do? She began to wonder about Mr Caspar.
    Miss Marple had never quite succeeded in abandoning her Victorian view of foreigners. One never knew with foreigners. Quite absurd, of course, to feel like that - she had many friends from various foreign countries. All the same...? Miss Cooke, Miss Barrow, Mr Caspar, that young man with the wild hair - Emlyn Something, a revolutionary, a practising anarchist? Mr and Mrs Butler, such nice Americans - but perhaps...too good to be true?
    “Really,” said Miss Marple, “I must pull myself together.”
    She turned her attention to the itinerary of their trip. Tomorrow, she thought, was going to be rather strenuous. A morning's sight-seeing drive, starting rather early, a long, rather athletic walk on a coastal path in the afternoon. Certain interesting marine flowering plants, It would be tiring. A tactful suggestion was appended. Anyone who felt like a rest could stay behind in their hotel, the Golden Boar, which had a very pleasant garden or could do a short excursion which would only take an hour, to a beauty spot nearby. She thought perhaps that she would do that.
    But though she did not know it then, her plans were to be suddenly altered.
    As Miss Marple came down from her room in the Golden Boar the next day after washing her hands before luncheon, a woman in a tweed coat and skirt came forward rather nervously and spoke to her.
    “Excuse me, are you Miss Marple, Miss Jane Marple?”
    “Yes, that is my name,” said Miss Marple, slightly surprised.
    “My name is Mrs Glynne. Lavinia Glynne. I and my two sisters live near here and, well, we heard you were coming, you see -”
    “You heard I was coming?” said Miss Marple with some