My father's hand held the crystal above the figures of the bequest written in the body of the will. The focused lens of glass magnified to a great diameter, and under the vast enlargement a thing that would escape the eye stood out. The top curl of a figure 3 had been erased, and the bar of a 5 added. One could see the broken fibers of the paper on the outline of the curl, and the bar of the five lay across the top of the three and the top of the o behind it like a black lath tacked across two uprights.
The figure 3 had been changed to 5 so cunningly is to deceive the eye, but not to deceive the vast magnification of the crystal. The thing stood out big and crude like a carpenter's patch.
Gosford's face became expressionless like wood, his body rigid; then he stood up and faced the three men across the table.
“Quite so!” he said in his vacuous English voice. “Marshall wrote a 3 by inadvertence and changed it. He borrowed my penknife to erase the figure.”
My father and Lewis gaped like men who see a penned-in beast slip out through an unimagined passage. There was silence. Then suddenly, in the strained stillness of the room, old Doctor Gaeki laughed.
Gosford lifted his long pink face, with its cropped beard bringing out the ugly mouth.
“Why do you laugh, my good man?” he said.
“I laugh,” replied Gaeki, “because a figure 5 can have so many colors.”
And now my father and Lewis were no less astonished than Mr. Gosford.
“Colors!” they said, for the changed figure in the will was black.