“I’m pained to hear you don’t like my eye, Mr. James--Mr. ‘Truthful James,’” I said sarcastically as I put the letter down, glancing sideways all the same at a mirror on the wall to see if I could detect any sinister expression in my eye which could account for the unfavourable opinion Mr. James had formed of that feature. “And so you didn’t tell me anything, didn’t you, you precious rascal? Some day I may have an opportunity of telling _you_ something, and then it is possible you may find something else to dislike about me as well as my eye. In the meantime I’ll take the liberty of detaining your letter, as it would put Mullen on the alert if I let it go on to him. His sister’s letter he must have, for if I fail to set hands on him here, I can take him when he keeps his appointment with her on the steam yacht, on board which he hopes to get out of the country. So I mustn’t lose a moment in resealing her letter and getting it back by hook or by crook to the letter-rack whence I got it. I’m not easy about the forgery with which I replaced it. If there had chanced to be only two or three letters waiting to be called for this morning, and I had abstracted one without replacing it with a dummy, the Professor would be bound to have noticed that a letter was missing. But I’m running a risk in leaving the forged dummy there a moment longer than I can help. Mullen might call and have it given him, or it may get sent on; and though I flatter myself that the forgery is so well done that even Mullen is not likely to notice any difference in the handwriting, and though it is possible also that he will think the cutting about Green’s death had been sent him by the Cotley barber, I’d much rather that the dummy didn’t fall into his hands. “To have forged a letter from the Cotley barber would have been extremely dangerous, for I didn’t then know how the rascal addressed Mullen. And to have enclosed a blank sheet of paper would at once suggest the trick which had been played. The newspaper cutting was the only thing I could think of that had the look of being a _bona fide_ enclosure from the rascal at Cotley. He had to my knowledge informed Mullen that Green was inquiring about him, and what was more natural than that, seeing a notice of Green’s death in the papers, he should send it on to his principal. But all the same, the sooner I get the dummy back into my own hands the better, for I don’t think--” At this point I broke off my meditations abruptly. I had been sitting in full view of Professor Lawrance’s door, and just then I saw him put his head out, look up and down the street as if to see whether he could safely be away for a few minutes without the probability of a customer popping in, and then cross the road in the direction of the nearest publichouse.