'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?'