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Updated: May 8, 2025
Otherwise the day proved to be wholly uneventful. I spent much time in consideration of my case, naturally; but this exercise yielded nothing more conclusive than that Alfred Fluette's place in it was assuming larger and larger proportions as time went by. I was much impressed with Maillot's charge to watch Burke. But here again I was offered no new light.
Maillot's temper was like gunpowder; the quiet question seemed to sting him to an unreasonable fury. "You you spy! You dirty sneak!" he snarled viciously. Unless I wanted affairs to get away from me entirely, it was high time to assume complete control of them, and immediately to abandon all temporizing measures. I turned Maillot about without ceremony.
So, impatiently, I requested Dr. De Breen to dismiss him. I was anxious to have over with the real ordeal of the day, for I knew that I thus correctly characterized to myself Maillot's session in the witness-chair, and, if I was not much mistaken, whatever was to follow after he was through with his remarkable story.
Was he looking at me, at the reaved safe, or at the pathetic little reminder, which I was holding in my hand, of that long-ago Christmas present? Though I could not be certain, I somehow felt that his interest was, at the moment, intense, and that I had been mistaken in thinking him a young man. As I slipped the time-worn card into a pocket, Maillot's voice broke in harshly upon my meditations.
I recalled, with a smile, that Burke had smelled of laundry soap, and that on the wash-stand in Maillot's room there had been no soap at all. Well, there are some queer ways of utilizing wealth; but I contend that, of all of them, to deny oneself the commonest comforts of existence is the queerest and the hardest to understand. A philosophy of living is involved utterly incomprehensible to me.
If you don't, you don't get the Paternoster ruby" and with a peculiar little laugh "most people would agree to anything for that, my lad." Maillot's interest was now centred upon the conditions; and they at once became a part of the fairy tale of which he was the beggar-transformed-into-a-prince hero so much were they of a nature to add to his elation, rather than provoke objections.
Further questioning elicited the assertion that he was utterly unable to account for Maillot's presence in the house; that he had never seen him before, and that he was sure the young man's call had been unexpected by Mr.
I continued, warming with the subject. Mr. Fluette, there 's nothing extraordinary in Maillot's story of his Tuesday night adventure except our stupidity in comprehending its real significance. Maillot and Miss Belle once married, then the young man in complete innocence, to be sure would have handed you, not the ruby, but the replica."
Then Maillot's mission could not have been without exceptional weight, I reflected. And unless I was much mistaken, the deferred journey had seriously disarranged some material plan for Mr. Burke. I had nothing more to say, however, for the present.
But to me Maillot's testimony was scarcely more than a running accompaniment to Alfred Fluette's strange behavior.
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