“Mine just now,” he replied, looking up and down me. His eyes seemed to find satisfaction in the sight of me; but he did not give me his hand; he did not come closer to me than ordinary nearness in the room made inevitable. I realized that he was deliberately holding away from me and I realized why. Here he was not only hiding from the police, with his life hanging upon every risk of recognition, but here he was also playing the part of Keeban; and he could enter no more deadly undertaking than this of impersonating Keeban, Harry Vine, and going out among Keeban’s people.
Of course he could have attained this perfection of nuance only through constant keeping to it and he would be foolish to endanger it by jumping in and out of character with each opening of his door.
“We can talk here?” I asked.
“What is it?”
It was so much, so many things, that I could lump them all only in the obvious, emotional statement, “I’ve come to see you.”
“Why?”
Since he seemed to demand a practical reason, “Shirley Scofield is being paid the insurance money to-day.”
He knew that. “Yes, she got a bunch of it this morning, some yesterday and some a couple of days ago. That’s why you tried to look me up day before yesterday, was it?”
“Partly,” I said.
“That’s all right about her getting the money.”