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 result of his school and university experience, that no matter how wide a circle of friends and acquaintances he might make for himself, his relations with society would always be essentially à deux.

He had turned on the light in his bedroom and thrown off his coat. As he moved about the room his attention was suddenly transfixed by a second message, in the form of a yellow oblong on the pillow of the bed.

"The idiot!" he exclaimed.

In an excess of care the janitor had placed a telegram where he thought it would be most likely to be found.

Hasn't there been enough already, Grover was thinking, standing cold with the unopened message, warding off premonitions of further harm, shrinking from the confirmation that he knew he must eventually read.

"Your mother dangerously ill. Very little hope. Come at once. James Marple."

He walked back into the study and closed the piano, then returned for the coat he had thrown on the bed, and put iton. Why did they always leave the laundrybag on the chair! He hung it on its nail in the closet. How intricately the Marples were bound up in his life! The tidying urge gradually released the cogs in his brain, and his thoughts began to revolve, slowly. This is It, they were saying: It, It, It, the Thing that had been getting ready to happen, the Thing he had known without knowing it.