The elevator came down, the uniformed middleaged man threw open the door. Rather to Miss Marple's surprise the alighting passenger was Bess Sedgwick whom she had seen go up only a minute or two before.

And then, one foot poised, Bess Sedgwick stopped dead, with a suddenness that surprised Miss Marple and made her own forward step falter. Bess Sedgwick was staring over Miss Marple's shoulder with such concentration that the old lady turned her own head.

The commissionaire had just pushed open the two swing doors of the entrance and was holding them to let two women pass through into the lounge. One of them was a fussy-looking middle-aged lady wearing a rather unfortunate flowered violet hat, the other was a tall, simply but smartly dressed girl of perhaps seventeen or eighteen with long straight flaxen hair.

Bess Sedgwick pulled herself together, wheeled round abruptly and re-entered the elevator. As Miss Marple followed her in, she turned to her and apologized.

"I'm so sorry. I nearly ran into you." She had a warm friendly voice. "I just remembered I'd forgotten something-which sounds nonsense but isn't really."

"Second floor?" said the operator. Miss Marple smiled and nodded in acknowledgment of the apology, got out and walked slowly along to her room, pleasurably turning over sundry little unimportant problems in her mind as was so often her custom.

For instance what Lady Sedgwick had said wasn't true. She had only just gone up to her room, and it must have been then that she "remembered she had forgotten something" (if there had been any truth in that statement at all) and had come down to find it. Or had she perhaps come down to meet someone or look for someone? But if so, what she had seen as the elevator door opened had startled and upset her, and she had immediately swung round into the elevator again and gone up so as not to meet whoever it was she had seen.