“A thousand pounds in—I believe—in hundreds,” answered Jericho carelessly.
“May I ask, sir, where you took these notes?” asked Basil.
“Where! What is that to you, sir?” and Jericho began to chafe. At last, with a forced smile, as though disdaining himself for the condescension, he said—“they’re new notes, ar’n’t they?”
Basil looked at Jericho, and then at the notes. Then he crumpled the paper in his fingers, and the sympathetic heart—the heart of money—felt a pang, and Jericho was, for a moment, drawn up in his chair, knees to chin. Basil eyed him with a fierce look—eyed the notes. “Humph!” he said, “Odd, tough paper! And the marks don’t look like ink, but black blood.”
“What do you mean, villain?” cried Jericho; and—it was a momentary flash of thought, of will—and Jericho saw Basil, dallying as he was with the secret, silenced, killed, put out of the way.
The perforated Bank Note.
“And the hole, sir! Do you mark?” and Basil smoothed out a note. “Odd, isn’t it? Just the round of a pistol bullet,” and Basil advanced the perforated paper under the very nose of Jericho, who, fallen in his chair, shrank up bodily from the note as from a spear’s point. “Come, sir,” cried Basil, “confess at once.”
“Why, what is the matter? Confess!” cried Mrs. Jericho, who had lingered near the door, and, alarmed and confused by the half-sentences that reached her, re-entered the library. “Confess what?”
“I will confess,” said Jericho: “and I could only wish that all the world could hear me; that all the world might know your baseness,” and the Man of Money glared at Basil.