The Fingerprint

Joh

“He said that?”

“Yes, he did-after breakfast in his study. I think he had just been telling Georgina. I saw her come upstairs, and I thought she looked as if something had happened.”

“How did she look?”

Mirrie Field said, “As if someone had hit her.”

He had a quick frown for that. It did just slip into his mind to think, “How does she know how a girl looks when someone has hit her?” but he let it go.

“Mirrie, look here, I don’t believe you ought to send that letter to Miss Brown.”

“Don’t you?”

“No, I don’t. I don’t think Jonathan would like it.”

“But he said he wanted everyone to know how he felt about me.”

“I daresay he did. I don’t suppose he wanted everyone to know that he was altering his will. He could be fu

“People?” said Mirrie in an ingenuous voice.

Joh

“Me?”

“Yes, darling. I think you had better tear up that letter to Miss Brown and drop the bits into a nice hot fire.”

Mirrie said, “Oh!” and then, “Oh, I couldn’t! It took me ever so long to write-and I promised.”

Joh

“Where is this school of yours?”

A good deal to his surprise she changed colour.

“It was the Grammar School. It was at Pigeon Hill.”

“And your Miss Browns taught there?”

“Not exactly. I just knew them. They-they were some sort of relation of Aunt Grace’s. They taught in another school.”

He thought she was making it up as she went along. But in the name of all that was ridiculous, why? He was looking at her curiously.

“Is it your school you don’t want to talk about, or theirs? And why?”

She said in a hurry,

“I didn’t like being there. I don’t want to think about it or talk about it ever.”

Yet she wrote to Miss Brown-a totally u

“Well, if it’s like that, I think I should let the whole thing fade. People are always saying they’ll write letters that never get written. Why not let it go down the drain?”

Tears welled up in the pansy-brown eyes. She said in a little soft, obstinate voice,

“I can’t.”

Joh

“Joh

He turned.

“What is it?”

“I didn’t like your saying that about funerals.”

“I am devastated!”

“You’re not-you did it to be horrid! I’ll just send this one letter, and then I won’t write again.”

He said, “I wouldn’t send it at all,” and went out of the room.

Half an hour later he looked from a window and saw a small green figure emerging upon the road. Miss Mirrie Field taking the air? Or going to post a letter? He ran after her and caught her up.

“Air-exercise-or business?”

She had put on the warm topcoat which matched her tweed skirt and pulled a green beret over her curls.

“I just thought I’d like a walk.”

“Then I’d like one too. And after tea we’ll go and do that flick in Lenton.”

She sparkled up at him.

“You are kind!”

The general shop which was also a branch post office was only a few hundred yards away.“ He was wondering whether she had Miss Brown’s letter in her pocket, and whether she would let him see her post it, when she said,

“I just want to go into Mrs. Holt’s and get some safety pins. I think it’s such an amusing shop-don’t you? Sweets, and cauliflowers, and bootlaces, and nailbrushes, and safety pins, and strings of onions-it’s so fu

The shop stood at the corner where the Deeping road ran off. It was an old crouched cottage with a new shop-front stuck on to it. On one side there was a garage with a couple of petrol pumps, and on the other a frightful little drab brick house which replaced the picturesque but insanitary cottage demolished by a bomb-splinter in ’44, the bomb itself having fallen in the middle of a field without so much as killing a sheep.

As they crossed over to Mrs. Holt’s, Mary and Deborah Shotterleigh came out of the shop with two bull-terriers, an Airedale and a Peke. All the dogs barked joyfully and jumped up. Mary and Deborah could just be heard lifting ineffective voices, but the dogs barked on. When the larger of the bull-terriers sprang up in an attempt to lick Mirrie’s chin she gave a little scream and clutched hold of Joh

“Down, Jasper! Down, Jane! Pingpong, you’ll get trodden on! No, Leo!” shrieked the Shotterleigh girls.

Mirrie continued to clutch and the letter which had slipped from her pocket fell down under the feet of the dogs. By the time that she had run into the shop and Mary and Deborah were explaining that Jasper and Jane were really only puppies and the greatest darlings in the world, Joh

He looked at the address, emitted a practically inaudible whistle, and posted the letter. He heard it fall into the box on the other side of the wall and turned round to wave goodbye to the Shotterleigh girls. They were hauling the bull-terriers away by means of handkerchiefs passed through their collars. The Airedale had come to heel, and the Peke’s expression made it plain that he dissociated himself from what he considered to have been a vulgar brawl.

They were safely on the other side of the road before Mirrie ventured out of the shop. She said, “What dreadful dogs!” After which she put her hand in her pocket and turned bright pink.

“My letter-oh, Joh

He looked at her with laughing eyes.

“It’s all right-I posted it.”

She said, “Oh!” They went over the road together.

When they were on the other side she produced a question.

“Did you look at it? Did it get muddy?”

“I looked at it. It had a paw mark in one corner-Jane’s, I think.”

She didn’t look at him. She was still rather pink. It was very becoming. Joh

“Perhaps I ought to have asked you before I posted it. It struck me there was something wrong about the address.”

“Oh-”

“Your letter was to Miss Brown, wasn’t it? Or wasn’t it?”

“Of course it was!”

“Well, it wasn’t addressed to her. It was addressed to Mr. E. C. Brown, 10 Marracott Street, Pigeon Hill, S.E. That’s a London suburb, isn’t it?”

She looked up at him sideways then, a creature wary of a trap. A squirrel perhaps? No, a kitten playing with a leaf- playing and catching it-playing and being caught. Only he wasn’t so sure that this was play. She gave him a sudden glancing smile and said,

“Didn’t I put Miss Brown’s name on it?”

“You did not.”

She heaved a small sigh.

“I am stupid. But it doesn’t matter-she’ll get it all right. She is staying with her brother.”

“Mr. E. C. Brown?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And she is staying with him in the middle of the school term?”

She said in a voice of soft reproach, “She hasn’t been well.”

He laughed in a ma