"You can't be sure about it?"
"No." Henry spoke with an exasperating indifference. It might have been Burton whose honor was involved, and Henry merely an uninterested bystander. Burton looked at him in great perplexity. His desire to help the man out was not lessened, but he felt baffled by the mask of reserve which Henry refused to lay aside. He so greatly disliked being placed in the attitude of forcing his proffers of assistance upon an unwilling recipient that only the thought of Leslie Underwood kept him from wishing to drop the matter then and there. But he did remember, and he put his pride in his pocket.
"All these matters are for your attorney," he said at last. "If there is any one whom you would rather have or would rather not have, I wish you'd tell me. I do not want to involve your feelings unnecessarily, and I shall certainly have to confer with your father on the subject."
Henry frowned, but after a moment's hesitation he took a pencil from his pocket and wrote a name and address on a leaf which he tore from a memorandum book.
"I think they would be as good as anybody, if I have to have some one," he said.
Burton took the paper, but he hardly glanced at the name, so interested was he in the pencil with which Henry wrote. It was a short flat pencil, such as carpenters use, and it made the broad black mark that Burton already knew from the mysterious missives of warning.
"Do you always use that sort of a pencil?" he asked.
Henry bent his black brows in a look of resentful inquiry.
"What if I do?"
"Because it is unusual, and leaves a peculiar mark, easily identified, and because I am assuming that you would rather be cleared than convicted," said Burton, exasperated into impatience. "When it is common report that you are the author of the anonymous messages which appear either in the typewriting of the machine in your house or in that broad black pencil, there certainly is every reason for finding out who is sufficiently familiar with your ways to imitate them so skilfully. Or is it common knowledge that you use a carpenter's pencil?"