Again there passed over the ingenuous face of the young girl that look which betrayed some vague but horrible memory. It perplexed Clifford and worried him. It was the one circumstance which marred his perfect belief in her, for it showed what all her words denied—that she had a little more knowledge than she confessed to.
“And what made you think the hand was mine?” asked she, in a troubled tone. And instinctively, as she spoke, she tried to hide her hands under the rim of the broad hat which she had taken off.
“Well, the hand was small and soft, like yours,” said Clifford in a low voice. “So small that it was almost like a child’s hand in mine. It seemed to me that I had only touched one hand in my life at all like it.”
Nell shot a frightened glance at him, and in the pause which followed Clifford saw a tear fall on to the table-cloth. He started up.
“Oh, this is horrible!” he moaned.
But the girl sprang up in her turn, and turning to her uncle, cried, in a voice full of energy:
“Uncle George, you must give to Mr. King the money he has lost, whatever it is. Of course,” she went on quickly, turning to Clifford with eyes now bright with excitement, “we cannot give you back your watch, but we can give you the value of it, if you will tell us what it is—the mere money value, I mean. For, of course, that is all we can do.”
But even before Clifford could protest against this suggestion, which he had, indeed, never contemplated for a moment, the innkeeper burst out into a torrent of indignant remonstrance.
“Me give him twenty-five pound! That’s what he said he had on him, an’ who’s to credit it? Who’s to prove it, I say? An’ the vally he likes to set on his watch besides? No, that I won’t. It’s my belief it’s a trumped-up story altogether, an’ I dare him to fetch the police in! I dare him to, I say!”
And he gave another thump on the table.