But the slight lift of his shoulders was indifferent enough.
“I listened deliberately. I was convinced that the fellow was a criminal impostor, and I wanted evidence.”
“Ah! come now,” remarked the duke amiably. “Now we are getting on. Did you gain any?”
“I thought so. Merely of the cumulative order, of course,” Palliser answered with moderation. “Those were early days. He asked you,” turning to Lady Joan again, “if you knew any one—any one—who had any sort of a photograph of Jem. You had one and you showed it to him!”
She was quite silent for a moment. The hour came back to her—the extraordinary hour when he had stood in his lounging fashion before her, and through some odd, uncivilized but absolutely human force of his own had made her listen to him—and had gone on talking in his nasal voice until with one common, crude, grotesque phrase he had turned her hideous world upside down—changed the whole face of it—sent the stone wall rising before her crumbling into dust, and seemed somehow to set her free. For the moment he had lifted a load from her the nature of which she did not think he could understand—a load of hatred and silence. She had clutched his hand, she had passionately wept on it, she could have kissed it. He had told her she could come back and not be afraid. As the strange episode rose before her detail by detail, she literally stared at Palliser.
“You did, didn't you?” he inquired.
“Yes,” she answered.
Her mind was in a riot, because in the midst of things which must be true, something was false. But with the memory of a myriad subtle duplicities in her brain, she had never seen anything which could have approached a thing like that. He had made her feel more human than any one in the world had ever made her feel—but Jem. He had been able to do it because he was human himself—human. “I'm friendly,” he had said with his boy's laugh—“just friendly.”
“I saw him start, though you did not,” Palliser continued. “He stood and studied the locket intently.”
She remembered perfectly. He had examined it so closely that he had unconsciously knit his brows.