"No, of course not," I murmured hastily, as Jenkins looked up at me with pleading in his somber eyes. "He's a very good servant, whatever else he may have been."
With a beaming smile Jenkins rose and opened the door of the safe.
"Now," said McKelvie, "I'm going to show you several curious, but rather interesting facts."
He turned to the lamp upon the table and gazed at it thoughtfully for a moment, then he snapped it on and off. "Did you notice anything odd about it?" he asked.
In imitation of his manner, I too gazed steadily at the lamp. I had paid no great attention to it before, being too overwrought to notice details, but now I saw, or thought I saw, what he meant.
In keeping with the style of the room, the lamp though small was made in the shape of a bacchante who wore on her hair a crown of leaves and about her bare shoulders a wreath of the grapevine, so exceedingly heavy that she held it away from her graceful body with her hands, from which depended a rather large cluster of magnificent grapes.
"It is very beautiful," I responded, "but odd for a lamp, and that bunch of grapes seems almost out of all proportion to the rest of the figure."
"True, but that is not what I referred to," he returned. "Look here!"
Again he pulled the cord which cleverly imitated a stray tendril clinging to the wreath, and a pleasant glow suffused the table, but much as I looked I could detect nothing amiss.
McKelvie smiled involuntarily at my anxious endeavor to discover the flaw. "Don't you see that the light comes from the right side of that cluster and not from the center?" he remarked. "Which means a double socket of course. Why then doesn't the other bulb light also?"