'I say, there's a mistake here. I've gone through your editor's letters. He's sound; I think I can help you to get at what he wants. But these other sheets have got mixed up with something else. I thought at first it was a story you'd given me, and I went on reading and got interested; and now I see it must have been written by some young woman friend of yours'—if it's meant for a letter.'
Mrs Gildea turned with a dismayed exclamation.
'Good gracious! You don't mean to say that I've given you her letter?'
'Is it really a letter? Do women type letters? It reads to me much more like what the heroine of a novel would be supposed to say than an ordinary everyday girl. If that's a flesh and blood woman I'd like to know her.'
Mrs Gildea took from him the three typed pages he had in his hand. They were certainly part of Lady Bridget's letter—almost the whole of it, for only the end and the beginning ones were missing. In her hurried rearrangement of the wind-scattered sheets she had put these into the wrong bundle. She ran her eye anxiously over the badly-typed slips, which, with their marginal corrections and smart, allusive jargon of a world entirely removed from Colin McKeith's experience, might easily have misled him into the belief that he was reading literary 'copy.' Of course he knew that Joan Gildea wrote novels as well as journalistic stuff.
He read her thoughts.
'You needn't worry. There isn't the least clue to her identity—I suppose that's what you're afraid of. Not a surname anywhere—I couldn't have imagined a woman would write like that—give herself away—as she does. But it's fine all the same. There'd be nothing small about that woman, Joan. Do you know how it ended?'
'I don't know yet. But I can guess.'
'Eh?' He blew out rings of smoke with less than his usual deliberation. 'D'ye think she'll marry the chap?'
'No—she never does.'