“You didn’t know, I suppose, that some shares in the Welcome have drifted into his hands?”
Julian shook his head with a quick frown of vexation.
“Ah!” observed Ramsay; “they have, though. And it has come to my knowledge that various enquiries have been made into the state of the Welcome Diamond Mine; made on the spot, and made in secret. And I’ve traced these enquiries to this Mr. Howard Compton.”
A dreadful grey pallor had begun to spread itself over Julian’s face, and the muscles seemed to have grown rigid with the intense force with which he held them to their expression of dogged determination. He did not speak, and Ramsay went on in the same dry, indifferent way:
“He is either a very clever hand, or very cleverly advised. The one point we score, at present, is that he has not done as he intended to do, and taken us by surprise.”
“Do you mean to say——”
The words seemed to come from between Julian’s dry, white lips almost without consciousness on his part. His eyes were fixed upon Ramsay with a hard, unseeing kind of stare, his voice was hoarse, uneven, and hardly audible, and it died away, leaving the sentence unfinished.
“The meaning is obvious, of course,” returned Ramsay. “An affair of this kind is a ticklish thing to pull off, and a hitch of this kind is always possible, though I never came across an affair in which it seemed less probable. I don’t know yet exactly how much our friend knows. The meeting won’t be a particularly placid affair, of course, and you’re likely to have a warm time of it. But, of course, there’s a chance that he mayn’t know quite enough, and we may be able to pull it through, yet.”
“And if not?”
Something seemed to rattle in Julian’s throat as he spoke the words, and they came out thick and husky.