Read Online Wicked Uncle by Patricia Wentworth - Free Book Online

opining that she would just have time to shop her rolled-gold safety-pin before she had to meet Mr. Oakley at his office. Justin dived into his pocket and produced something in an envelope.
    “This will look nicer than a safety-pin—at least I hope you’ll think so. It belonged to my mother.”
    “Oh, Justin!” Her colour changed brightly.
    Inside the envelope was a shabby little brown leather case, and inside the case, on a background of ivory velvet which had turned as yellow as the keys of an old piano, there was a shining brooch. Dorinda gazed at it and felt quite unable to speak. The interlaced double circle of small bright diamonds caught the light. She lifted swimming eyes to Justin’s face.
    “You like it?”
    She took a long breath.
    “It’s much too lovely!”
    “Put it on.”
    Half way to her throat her hands remained suspended.
    “Justin—you oughtn’t to—I mean I oughtn’t to take it. If it was your mother’s, oughtn’t you to keep it? Because when you get married—” She stopped there, because the idea of Justin getting married hurt so frightfully that she couldn’t go on.
    There was a curious emotional moment. Justin looked at her rather gravely and said,
    “What sort of girl do you think I ought to marry?”
    It was of course quite easy to answer this, though it hurt like knives and daggers. Dorinda had always known exactly the sort of girl that Justin would marry, and within the last few months, from being a type, this girl had become someone with a name. Dorinda had seen her photograph in a gossipy weekly— “Mr. Justin Leigh and Miss Moira Lane.” She cut out the picture and kept it, and one day when she was feeling extra brave she asked Justin, “Who is Moira Lane?” and got a frown and a casual “Oh, just a girl I know.” After that she saw them together once or twice—at lunch when she was out with Tip, and at the theatre with Buzzer. Moira Lane always looked just the same—as if she knew exactly what to do and how to do it.
    She was very, very decorative of course, but she might have been that and yet all wrong for Justin. It was that look of being dead right and dead sure of being right which ran the splinter of ice into Dorinda’s heart. She laid the brooch back on its ivory bed and began to draw strokes on the tablecloth with the tip of her finger.
    “Tall, and of course very, very slim, only not thin—you don’t like thin girls, do you? And perhaps very fair hair—only I don’t know that that matters very much as long as it’s beautifully done. And very, very smart, with all the right clothes, and knowing just where to get them. And what you do and what you don’t do, and just the right kind of make-up, and when a thing’s dead and you just can’t be seen with it any more. Because, you know, all that sort of thing is very difficult unless you’ve been brought up to it, only even then some people are much better at it than others—and you’d have to have someone who was really good at it.”
    “Would I?”
    “Oh, yes, Justin. Because you notice everything, and you can’t bear it if there’s the least thing wrong. You like everything to be perfect, so you would have to marry a girl who would never, never make a mistake.”
    She pushed the little brown leather case across the table, not looking at it, because her eyes never left his face. He picked it up and put it down in front of her.
    “She would probably think my mother’s brooch old-fashioned. I think I’d rather you had it. Suppose you put it on.”
    “Oh, Justin!”
    “My darling child, don’t be ridiculous. I shouldn’t give it to you if I didn’t want you to have it… No, that’s not right—a little higher up… That will do.” He looked at his wrist watch and got up briskly. “I shall have to fly. Be a good child. And continue to report progress.”
    Chapter IX
    Mrs. Oakley had been wishing all the morning that she hadn’t sent Dorinda up to town. Any of the three houses to which