“Yes, darling,” said Mr. Gardener.

“And where’s your girl this morning, Captain Marshall?”

“Linda? I don’t know. I expect she’s mooning round the island somewhere.”

“You know, Captain Marshall, that girl looks kind of peaky to me. She needs feeding up and very very sympathetic treatment.”

Kenneth Marshall said curtly:

“Linda’s all right.”

He went up to the hotel.

Patrick Redfern did not go into the water. He sat about, frankly looking up towards the hotel. He was beginning to look a shade sulky.

Miss Brewster was brisk and cheerful when she arrived.

The conversation was much as it had been on a previous morning. Gentle yapping from Mrs. Gardener and short staccato barks from Miss Brewster.

She remarked at last: “Beach seems a bit empty. Everyone off on excursions?”

Mrs. Gardener said:

“I was saying to Mr. Gardener only this morning that we simply must make an excursion to Dartmoor. It’s quite near and the associations are all so romantic. And I’d like to see that convict prison—Princetown, isn’t it? I think we’d better fix up right away and go there tomorrow, Odell.”

Mr. Gardener said:

“Yes, darling.”

Hercule Poirot said to Miss Brewster.

“You are going to bathe, Mademoiselle?”

“Oh I’ve had my morning dip before breakfast. Somebody nearly brained me with a bottle, too. Chucked it out of one of the hotel windows.”

“Now that’s a very dangerous thing to do,” said Mrs. Gardener. “I had a very dear friend who got concussion by a toothpaste tin falling on him in the street—thrown out of a thirty-fifth storey window it was. A most dangerous thing to do. He got very substantial damages.” She began to hunt among her skeins of wool. “Why, Odell, I don’t believe I’ve got that second shade of purple wool. It’s in the second drawer of the bureau in our bedroom or it might be the third.”

“Yes, darling.”

Mr. Gardener rose obediently and departed on his search.

Mrs. Gardener went on:

“Sometimes, you know, I do think that maybe we’re going a little too far nowadays. What with all our great discoveries and all the electrical waves there must be in the atmosphere, I do think it leads to a great deal of mental unrest, and I just feel that maybe the time has come for a new message to humanity. I don’t know, M. Poirot, if you’ve ever interested yourself in the prophecies from the Pyramids.”

“I have not,” said Poirot.

“Well, I do assure you that they’re very, very interesting. What with Moscow being exactly a thousand miles due north of—now what was it?—would it be Nineveh?—but anyway you take a circle and it just shows the most surprising things—and one can just see that there must have been special guidance, and that those ancient Egyptians couldn’t have thought of what they did all by themselves. And when you’ve gone into the theory of the numbers and their repetition, why it’s all just so clear that I can’t see how anyone can doubt the truth of it for a moment.”