and and one or two faint ejaculations and a
queer little laugh he gave once or twice as he read.

Presently he said:

'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.'

'She's a flirt, then?'

'Bid--' Mrs Gildrea swallowed the rest. 'SHE would scorn such a
commonplace suggestion. Do you remember that novel of Hardy's, THE
WELL-BELOVED? She's like the man there, who was always in love with the
same Ideal--under different forms--until he found that he'd made a
mistake, and then the game began all over again.'

McKeith ruminated. 'SHE'S like that, is she? ... The fellow is what
you'd call a bounder?' he