Captain Malone got to his feet and looked around at her. “You shouldn’t have done a thing like that, Miss Frazier,” he said reproachfully. His voice was gentle as the morning dew, and his face was very grave and paternal as he shook his head at her—and the senior Hamlet’s ghost never looked so much more in sorrow than in anger.
“Don’t you see what you’ve done? Now I’ve got to begin thinking all over again. I’ve got to ask myself why Judge Whitney’s secretary is so anxious for me not to know she’s burning a piece of cloth that she spoils a coat to do it—because anybody can tell the difference. Cloth and fur don’t smell the same when they burn. It’s easy to tell when they’ve both been burned. You ought to have known that, oughtn’t you?”
He was speaking as if to a three-year-old child, and
