__noTOC__
HAT did he get?" I asked. I had been working in my own room all the morning and had not seen the papers—they arrived from London about half-past eleven.
"Seven years' penal servitude," said our host the Major with grim satisfaction.
"Stiff!" I commented.
"Not a bit too much," asserted the Major, helping himself to game pie again—he is a good luncher. "He's a thoroughly bad lot—a professional thief, and a deuced clever one. It's his first conviction, but it ought to have been his tenth, I should say."
"He was certainly in that big American bond robbery," said Crookes, "though he got off that time. Oxford man, wasn't he?"
"Yes. In fact I believe I was up one term with him," said Millington. "I must have seen him, I think, but I can't remember him."
"Dear, dear!" our hostess observed, shocked apparently at this close proximity to the criminal classes.
"Rather good what the chap said when he'd been sentenced," drawled Charlie Pryce. "See it? Well, he bowed to the judge, and then he bowed to the jury, and smiled, and shrugged his shoulders, and said: 'The risks of the profession, gentlemen! Au revoir!' Jolly good cheek!" Charlie's round red face—he is very well-nourished, as they say at inquests—beamed almost sympathetically.
"I suppose he owes his nickname to his professional dexterity?" said I.
"Suppose so," agreed Charlie.
"No," said Mrs. Pryce, who was at the other end of the table. "His name is James"
"Yes, James Painter Walsh," interposed the Major, accurate always.
"But he was called 'Slim-Fingered' because he had beautiful hands with very slender tapering fingers."
"Hallo, Minnie!" cried Pryce, "how do you know that?"
"He told me himself," she answered, with a smile and the hint of a blush. "I crossed from America with him the time he was arrested at Queenstown for the bond robbery, and—well, we got acquainted. Of course nobody knew who he was."
A torrent of questions overwhelmed Mrs. Pryce. She had achieved fame—she had known the hero of the last famous jewel robbery. She spoke of him from first-hand knowledge. The unrivaled attraction of crime—crime in the grand manner—fascinates us all. But she wouldn't say much.
"He was just an acquaintance for the voyage," she told us; "though, of course, it was rather a shock when he was arrested at Queenstown."
"Oh, what a surprise!" exclaimed Charlie Pryce jovially.
"A surprise?" She seemed to me to start ever so little. "Oh, yes, of course—terrible!" she went on the next instant.
"Was he nice?" asked our hostess.
"Yes, he was very—very attractive," she answered. And somehow I fancy her glance rested for a moment on her husband—indeed on a particular portion of him. Charlie was just lighting the after-lunch cigarette. Charlie's hands—he is a very good fellow and well-off—are decidedly red and particularly pudgy.
LIKED Mrs. Pryce very much. She was pretty, dainty, bright, and—well, bachelors are so apt to think that pretty married women have a dull time at home that I will lay no stress on my own private opinion as to her domestic lot. Enough that I was always glad to talk with her, and that it was pleasant to walk with her in the Major's quiet old garden on a fine night when the wind stirred the boughs and the moon shone. Inside they had taken to pool—and whisky-and-soda. I play the former badly, and take the latter when the evening is more advanced.
"Beautiful moon!" I observed, enjoying Nature, my company, and my cigar.
She was silent a moment. Then she said: "It shone just like that the third night out from New York."
"Your last trip?" She crosses pretty often, as Charlie has business connections on the other side.
"No. The one when—the one we were talking about at lunch."
"Ah! When our friend of the slim fingers?"
"Yes."
"Let's sit down," I suggested. We were just passing a garden seat.
She smiled at me half sadly, half mockingly. She saw through me; she knew I wanted to hear more about it. By some sort of sympathy I knew that she wanted to talk about it. It was queer, too, to consider through what window that moon was shining on Slim-Fingered Jim. Did it—and his other surroundings—remind him of the broad Atlantic? "The risks of the profession, gentlemen!"
"Yes, he had beautiful hands," she murmured.
"What'll they look like when?"
She caught my hand sharply in hers. "Hush, hush!" she whispered. I felt ashamed of myself, but of course I couldn't have known that—well, that she'd feel it like that.