His hand rose instinctively to take it; then dropped.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he remarked. “You have nothing of mine.”
“No? Then John Judson Moore had another brother.” And I thrust the paper back into my pocket.
He followed it with his eye. It was the memorandum I had found in the old book of memoirs plucked from the library shelf within, and he recognized it for his and saw that I did also. But he failed to show the white feather.
“You are good at ransacking,” he observed; “pity that it can not be done to more purpose.”
I smiled and made a fresh start. With my hand thrust again into my pocket, I remarked, without even so much as a glance at him:
“I fear that you do some injustice to the police. We are not such bad fellows; neither do we waste as much time as you seem to think.” And drawing out my hand, with the little filigree ball in it, I whirled the latter innocently round and round on my finger. As it flashed under his eye, I cast him a penetrating look.
He tried to carry the moment off successfully; I will give him so much credit. But it was asking too much of his curiosity, and there was no mistaking the eager glitter which lighted his glance as he saw within his reach this article which a moment before he had probably regarded as lost forever.
“For instance,” I went on, watching him furtively, though quite sure from his very first look that he knew no more now of the secret of this little ball than he knew when he jotted down the memorandum I had just pocketed before his eyes, “a little thing—such a little thing as this,” I repeated, giving the bauble another twist—“may lead to discoveries such as no common search would yield in years. I do not say that it has; but such a thing is possible, you know: who better?”
My nonchalance was too much for him. He surveyed me with covert dislike, and dryly observed “Your opportunities have exceeded mine, even with my own effects. That petty trinket which you have presumed to flaunt in my face—and of whose value I am the worst judge in the world since I have never had it in my hand—descended to me with the rest of Mrs. Jeffrey’s property. Your conduct, therefore, strikes me in the light of an impertinence, especially as no one could be supposed to have more interest than myself in what has been for many years recognized as a family talisman.”