I had to confess, as I watched his deft movements about that china-strewn oblong of damask which seemed his fit and rightful domain, that he was in no way wanting in the part--the only thing that puzzled me was the futility of that part. There was authority, too, in his merest finger-movement and eye-shift, as from time to time he signaled to the footman who helped him in his duties. There was grave solicitude on his face as he awaited the minutest semaphoric nod of the woman in the blue silk dinner gown. And this was the man, with his stolid air of exactitude, with his quick-handed movements and his alert and yet unparticipating eyes, whom I had come into that quiet household to proclaim a thief! I watched his hands every course as I sat there talking against time--and Heaven knows what I talked of! But about those hands there was nothing to discover. In the first thing of importance I had met with disappointment. For the cuffs that projected from the edges of the livery sleeves covered each large-boned wrist. In the actual deportment of the man there was nothing on which to base a decent suspicion. And in the meanwhile the dinner progressed, as all such dinners do, smoothly and quietly, and, to outward appearances, harmoniously and happily. But as it progressed I grew more and more perplexed. There was another nauseating moment or two when the thought flashed over me that the whole thing was indeed a mistake, that what I had seemed to hear in my restless moments of the night before was only a dream projected into a period of wakefulness. Equipped with nothing more than an echo from this dream, I had started off on this mad chase, to run down a man who had proved and was proving himself the acme of decorous respectability. But if this thought was a sickening one, it was also a sickly one. Like all sickly things, too, it tended to die young. It went down before the crowding actualities of other circumstances which I could not overlook. Coincidence, repeated often enough, became more than fortuity. The thing was more than a nightmare. I had heard what I had heard. There was still some method by which I could verify or contradict my suspicion. My problem was to find a plan. And the gravity of my dilemma, I suppose, was in some way reflected in my face. "Well, what are you going to do about it?" asked Van Tuyl, with his heavy matter-of-factness, at a moment when the room happened to be empty. "Don't you see it's a mistake?" added his wife, with a self-assuring glance about the rose-shaded table and then a wider glance about the room itself. "Wait," I suddenly said. "What were his references?" "He gave us a splendid one from the Whippeny Club. We verified that. Then he had letters, six of them from some very decent people in London. One of them was a bishop." "Did you verify those?" "Across the Atlantic, Witter? It really didn't seem worth while!" "And it's lucky for him you didn't!" "Why?"