“On no especial errand; only to see him. I always go over two or three times a week, or thereabouts.”
“And, according to Mr. March, you raised a window in your uncle’s sitting room, thereby leaving your fingerprints on the white enamel paint?”
“So Mr. March told me. I know little of fingerprints—I mean as evidence—but I well know how they mar white paint. I am a tidy housekeeper, and I am continually at war with fingerprints on white paint.”
I glanced around the porch and looked through the window into the living room. Everything was immaculate and I could well believe that the girl made a fetish of tidiness.
“Yes. Then it scarcely seems like you to have your hands in such condition that they would leave marks on the window frame.”
“No, it doesn’t seem like me.” Alma lifted her lovely little hands one after the other and scrutinized them with apparent interest. “No, I rarely have dirty hands. Even as a child, Merry says I was always tidy. But, Mr. Moore, I’m told that fingerprints cannot be mistaken, and so the fact remains, doesn’t it, that on that particular occasion my hands did need washing?”
There was a certain something in Alma’s voice that drew my attention. She seemed to be speaking casually, seemed really indifferent as to the subject, yet her tone was alert and her whole manner tense. It was almost as if she was studying the effect of her words on Moore far more intently than he was studying her. Yet, this was absurd. Why should she fear him? She had already admitted and explained the fingerprints to March, who had expressed himself satisfied.
“You went to the window, then, to raise it in order to let more air into the room?”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t it rain in?”