The Moving Finger Read Online Free

The Moving Finger
Book: The Moving Finger Read Online Free
Author: Agatha Christie
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after all, walk down to the town unaccompanied. I had gone about two hundred yards, when I heard a bicycle bell behind me, then a scrunching of brakes, and then Megan Hunter more or less fell off her machine at my feet.
    â€œHallo,” she said breathlessly as she rose and dusted herself off.
    I rather liked Megan and always felt oddly sorry for her.
    She was Symmington the lawyer’s stepdaughter, Mrs. Symmington’s daughter by a first marriage. Nobody talked much about Mr. (or Captain) Hunter, and I gathered that he was considered best forgotten. He was reported to have treated Mrs. Symmington very badly. She had divorced him a year or two after the marriage. She was a woman with means of her own and had settled down with her little daughter in Lymstock “to forget,” and had eventually married the only eligible bachelor in the place, Richard Symmington. There were two boys of the second marriage to whom their parents were devoted, and I fancied that Megan sometimes felt odd man out in the establishment. She certainly did not resemble her mother, who was a small anaemic woman, fadedly pretty, who talked in a thin melancholy voice of servant difficulties and her health.
    Megan was a tall awkward girl, and although she was actually twenty, she looked more like a schoolgirlish sixteen. She had a shock of untidy brown hair, hazel green eyes, a thin bony face, and an unexpected charming one-sided smile. Her clothes were drab and unattractive and she usually had on lisle thread stockings with holes in them.
    She looked, I decided this morning, much more like a horse than a human being. In fact she would have been a very nice horse with a little grooming.
    She spoke, as usual, in a kind of breathless rush.
    â€œI’ve been up to the farm—you know, Lasher’s—to see if they’d got any duck’s eggs. They’ve got an awfully nice lot of little pigs. Sweet! Do you like pigs? I even like the smell.”
    â€œWell-kept pigs shouldn’t smell,” I said.
    â€œShouldn’t they? They all do round here. Are you walking down to the town? I saw you were alone, so I thought I’d stop and walk with you, only I stopped rather suddenly.”
    â€œYou’ve torn your stocking,” I said.
    Megan looked rather ruefully at her right leg.
    â€œSo I have. But it’s got two holes already, so it doesn’t matter very much, does it?”
    â€œDon’t you ever mend your stockings, Megan?”
    â€œRather. When Mummy catches me. But she doesn’t notice awfully what I do—so it’s lucky in a way, isn’t it?”
    â€œYou don’t seem to realize you’re grown up,” I said.
    â€œYou mean I ought to be more like your sister? All dolled up?”
    I rather resented this description of Joanna.
    â€œShe looks clean and tidy and pleasing to the eye,” I said.
    â€œShe’s awfully pretty,” said Megan. “She isn’t a bit like you, is she? Why not?”
    â€œBrothers and sisters aren’t always alike.”
    â€œNo. Of course. I’m not very like Brian or Colin. And Brian and Colin aren’t like each other.” She paused and said, “It’s very rum, isn’t it?”
    â€œWhat is?”
    Megan replied briefly: “Families.”
    I said thoughtfully, “I suppose they are.”
    I wondered just what was passing in her mind. We walked on in silence for a moment or two, then Megan said in a rather shy voice:
    â€œYou fly, don’t you?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œThat’s how you got hurt?”
    â€œYes, I crashed.”
    Megan said:
    â€œNobody down here flies.”
    â€œNo,” I said. “I suppose not. Would you like to fly, Megan?”
    â€œMe?” Megan seemed surprised. “Goodness, no. I should be sick. I’m sick in a train even.”
    She paused, and then asked with that directness which only a child usually displays:
    â€œWill you get all right
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