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.‘Thank you, dearest,’ she said, taking his arm.‘Now I really feel somebody.’It had always been their custom to leave and return to the village by different trains so that they should not be seen at the station together, but this time, perhaps because of Mizpah, they decided to return together and, if necessary, to pretend that they had met accidentally.But now, although they were not to know it yet, it did not really matter what they did, for Miss Doggett, alone in the house, had come upon the truth about them.Stumbled on it, was how she put it to herself.Ever since the week-end when Jessie had upset the tea on Prudence’s dress, she had had a feeling that there was something different about Jessie.She had noticed her smiling to herself and had several times caught her at the window, looking down into Fabian’s garden.After Jessie had gone out for the afternoon, Miss Doggett felt restless and dissatisfied.She put her feet up as usual for her after luncheon rest and listened to a woman’s programme on the wireless, but somehow its competent little talks about breast feeding, young children’s questions, and a housewife’s life in Nigeria did not seem to be planned for an elderly spinster.Her library book also failed to hold her attention, for although, according to the mystifying jargon of the publishers, its fourth large impression had been exhausted before publication, its effect on her was that of exhausting without granting the blessing of sleep.When at three o’clock, therefore, she had.not managed to drop off, her thoughts turned to Jessie.Why had she deliberately upset a cup of tea over Miss Bates? For it seemed now as if the action had been deliberately calculated.What could she have hoped to gain by it? Miss Doggett pushed away her foot-stool, flung her book down on the floor and walked upstairs.Jessie’s room was without any definite character apart from that given to it by the miscellaneous pieces, unwanted in other rooms, with which it was furnished.In all the years that she had lived with Miss Doggett, Jessie had not succeeded in stamping it with her own personality.One would have imagined that a gentlewoman would have her ‘things,’ those objects — photographs, books, souvenirs collected on holiday — which can make a room furnished with other people’s furniture into a kind of home.But Jessie seemed to have none of these.The only photograph was of her mother — Miss Doggett’s Cousin Ella — a plain-looking woman with an unsuitably sardonic expression for a Victorian.She had married late and had made an unfortunate marriage — Miss Doggett’s thoughts lingered with satisfaction on this theme for a few minutes, for Aubrey Morrow had left his wife and child after a few years — and then continued her examination of the room.The only books to be seen were the library book Jessie happened to be reading at that moment, a paper-backed detective novel that anybody might have and, rather oddly, an old A.B.C.There were no books of devotion, not even a Bible or a prayer-book, which one might certainly expect a spinster to possess.The ‘objects’ were even more un-promising — an ugly little china dog of some Scottish breed attached to an ash-tray, an old willow-pattern bowl with no apparent purpose, some dusty sea-shells in a box — it seemed almost as if Jessie had been at pains to suppress or conceal her personality.For there was no doubt that she had personality of an uncomfortable kind; she had inherited her mother’s sardonic expression, and who could tell how much of her father there might be in her? These things always came out eventually.It was quite likely that she herself might make an unsuitable marriage.But who was there for her to make an unsuitable marriage with? That was the point.Miss Doggett’s thoughts ranged rather wildly from the man who delivered the laundry and was rather free in his manner, to the Roman Catholic priest of the little tin church, whom Jessie had once admitted she thought handsome.Certainly the latter would be quite disgraceful.He would be unfrocked, no doubt….Miss Doggett moved over to the wardrobe and opened it
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