Colin gave a little sigh and the smile dawned on his face. He wrote in a “three,” making the date of March 1 into March 31, and then once again he paused, watching with eager eyes for the ink to dry on the page. Then, taking up a penknife which lay on the table beside him, he erased, but not quite erased, the “three” he had just written there. He left unerased, as if a hurried hand had been employed on the erasure, the cusp of the figure, and a minute segment of a curve both above and below it.
Looking at the entry as he looked at it now, when his work was done, with but casual carefulness, any inspector of it would say that it recorded the marriage of Philip Lord Stanier to Rosina Viagi on the first of March. But had the inspector’s attention been brought to bear more minutely on it, he must, if directed to hold the page sideways to the light, have agreed that there had been some erasure made in front of the figure denoting the day of the month; for there was visible the scratching of a penknife or some similar instrument. Then, examining it more closely, he would certainly see the cusp of a “three,” the segment of the upper curve, and a dot of ink in the place where the lower segment would have been.
These remnants would scarcely have struck his eye at all, had not he noticed that there were the signs of an erasure there. With them, it was impossible for the veriest tyro in conjecture not to guess what the erasure had been.
The whole thing took but a half-minute, and at the expiration of that, Colin was employed on the transcription of the record of the marriage. He knew that he had to curb a certain trembling of his hand, to reduce to a more regular and slower movement the taking of his breath, which came in pants, as if he had been running.
Half a minute ago, no notion of what he had already accomplished had entered his head; his imagination had not travelled further than the possibility of changing the date which he knew he should find here into one thirty days later. Out of the void, out of the abyss, this refinement in forgery had come to him, and he already recognised without detailed examination how much more astute, how infinitely more cunning, was this emended tampering. Just now he could spare but a side glance at that, for he must copy this entry (unaware that pen and pen-knife had been busy there) and take it to plump Mr. Cecil for his signature, but the sharp, crisp tap of conviction in his mind told him that he had done more magnificently well than his conscious brain had ever suggested to him.
No longer time than was reasonable for this act of copying alone had elapsed before Colin laid down his pen and went into the next room.
“Well, Mr. Stanier, have you done your copying?” asked Cecil.
“Yes. Shall I bring it here for your signature?” said Colin.
Mr. Cecil climbed down from the high stool where he was perched like some fat, cheerful little bird.
“No, no,” he said. “We must be more business-like than that. I must compare your copy with the original entry before I give you my signature.”