“I tell you,” said Melun, almost earnestly, “that I found nothing.”
“That is to say,” said Westerham, “nothing which you could turn to your own good account.”
Melun smiled a sour yet demure little smile.
“Permit me,” said the baronet, just as quietly, “to inform you that you are a liar. If you will be good enough to turn over the bundle of socks which you will find in the right-hand corner of the kit-bag as it faces you now, I think you will be able to hand me something that is of interest to us both.”
“I was not aware that I could,” replied Captain Melun with a touch of sarcasm in his voice.
Westerham picked up again the six-shooter which he had laid carelessly at his side.
“Have a look,” he said, and his voice was gently persuasive.
Just a flicker of vindictiveness crept into Melun's eyes, and under the suasion of firearms he turned again to the bag.
After a few moments Westerham, now schooled to infinite placidity, inquired for the second time if he had found anything.
“Only a few papers,” said Captain Melun, crossly.
“Pardon me,” said the baronet, “if I am not mistaken you have found only one paper. Be kind enough to hand it to me.”
The captain turned about, and with a carefully-manicured hand offered Westerham a slip of paper which had evidently been torn from some English periodical.
Westerham took it and looked at it casually, though the muscles on his closed jaws stood out in a manner that was not wholly pleasant to look upon. It was, however, with unfathomable eyes that he surveyed the scrap of paper before him. It revealed the portrait of a girl with an astonishingly quiet face. Her cheeks were round and soft, and her chin was round and soft too, but her mouth, a little full and pronounced, was distinctly sad and set. A pair of large dark eyes looked out upon the world unwaveringly and serenely, if a little sorrowfully, beneath a pair of finely-pencilled, level brows, which formed, as it were, a little bar of inflexible resolve. A mass of dark hair was coiled upon the girl's head after the manner of early Victorian heroines. It was a face at once striking and wistful in its splendour.
The piece of paper had been torn with a jagged edge across the girl's throat, so that the inscription which would have borne her name was lacking.