"I don't think you want to feel any more, do you?" said the priest good-humouredly. "You're a detective, aren't you?"
"Yep," replied the other. "Lady Mounteagle asked me to keep an eye on the Master, being no fool, for all her mysticism; and when he left his tent, I could only follow by behaving like a nuisance and a monomaniac. If anybody had come into my tent, I'd have had to look up Bumps in an encyclopaædia."
"Bumps, What Ho She; see Folk-Lore," observed Father Brown, dreamily. "Well, you were quite in the part in pestering people—at a bazaar."
"Rum case, wasn't it?" remarked the fallacious Phrenologist. "Queer to think the thing was there all the time."
"Very queer," said the priest.
Something in his voice made the other man stop and stare.
"Look here!" he cried; "what's the matter with you? What are you looking like that for! Don't you believe that it was there all the time?"
Father Brown blinked rather as if he had received a buffet; then he said slowly and with hesitation: "No ... the fact is ... I can't—I can't quite bring myself to believe it."
"You're not the sort of chap," said the other shrewdly, "who'd say that without reason. Why don't you think the ruby had been there all the time?"
"Only because I put it back myself," said Father Brown.