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divorce court and everybody hopefully started again—when fresh tangles were created. Mildred Strete was clearly jealous of Gina and disliked her. That, Miss Marple thought, was very natural.
    She thought over what Ruth Van Rydock had told her. Carrie Louise’s disappointment at not having a child—the adoption of little Pippa—and then the discovery that, after all, a child was on the way.
    â€œOften happens like that,” Miss Marple’s doctor had told her. “Relief of tension, maybe, and then Nature can do its work.”
    He had added that it was usually hard lines on the adopted child.
    But that had not been so in this case. Both Gulbrandsen and his wife had adored little Pippa. She had made her place too firmly in their hearts to be lightly set aside. Gulbrandsen was already a father. Paternity meant nothing new to him. Carrie Louise’s maternal yearnings had been assuaged by Pippa. Her pregnancy had been uncomfortable and the actual birth difficult and prolonged. Possibly Carrie Louise, who had never cared for reality, did not enjoy her first brush with it.
    There remained two little girls growing up, one pretty and amusing, the other plain and dull. Which again, Miss Marplethought, was quite natural. For when people adopt a baby girl, they choose a pretty one. And though Mildred might have been lucky and taken after the Martins who had produced handsome Ruth and dainty Carrie Louise, Nature elected that she should take after the Gulbrandsens who were large and stolid and uncompromisingly plain.
    Moreover Carrie Louise was determined that the adopted child should never feel her position and in making sure of this she was overindulgent to Pippa and sometimes less than fair to Mildred.
    Pippa had married and gone away to Italy, and Mildred, for a time, had been the only daughter of the house. But then Pippa had died and Carrie Louise had brought Pippa’s baby back to Stonygates and once more Mildred had been out of it. There had been the new marriage—the Restarick boys. In 1934 Mildred had married Canon Strete, a scholarly antiquarian about ten or fifteen years older, and had gone away to live in the south of England. Presumably she had been happy—but one did not really know. There had been no children. And now here she was, back again in the same house where she had been brought up. And once again, Miss Marple thought, not particularly happy in it.
    Gina, Stephen, Wally, Mildred, Miss Bellever who liked an ordered routine and was unable to enforce it. Lewis Serrocold, who was clearly blissfully and wholeheartedly happy, an idealist able to translate his ideals into practical measures. In none of these personalities did Miss Marple find what Ruth’s words had led her to believe she might find. Carrie Louise seemed secure, remote at the heart of the whirlpool—as she had been all her life. What then, in that atmosphere, had Ruth felt to be wrong …? Did she, Jane Marple, feel it also?
    What of the outer personalities of the whirlpool—the occupational therapists, the schoolmasters, earnest, harmless young men, confident young Dr. Maverick, the three pink-faced, innocent-eyed young delinquents—Edgar Lawson….
    And here, just before she fell asleep, Miss Marple’s thoughts stopped and revolved speculatively round the figure of Edgar Lawson. Edgar Lawson reminded her of someone or something. There was something a little wrong about Edgar Lawson—perhaps more than a little. Edgar Lawson was maladjusted—that was the phrase, wasn’t it? But surely that didn’t, and couldn’t, touch Carrie Louise?
    Mentally, Miss Marple shook her head.
    What worried her was something more than that.

Five
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    G ently eluding her hostess the next morning, Miss Marple went out into the gardens. Their condition distressed her. They had once been an ambitiously set-out achievement. Clumps of rhododendrons, smooth slopes of lawn, massed borders of