“No,” returned the other, with a short, sharp, and wholly undisturbed laugh, “I do not think I ever have.”
“Will you give me credit, then, for speaking with reason, when I declare to you that the man you overheard talking in the manner you profess to describe in your communication, was not Mr. Bertram Sylvester?”
A shrug of the shoulders, highly foreign and suggestive, was the other’s answer. “It was Mr. Sylvester or it was the devil,” proclaimed he—“with all deference to your reason, my good sir; or why are you here?” he keenly added.
Mr. Sylvester did not reply. With a sarcastic twitch of his lips the man took up the nickle with which he had been amusing himself when the former came in, and set it spinning again upon the table. “It is half-past six,” remarked he. “It will take me a good half hour to go to my lawyer.”
Mr. Sylvester made a final effort. “If you could be convinced,” said he, “that you have got your grasp upon the wrong man, would you still persist in the course upon which you seem determined?”
With a dexterous sleight-of-hand movement, the man picked up the whirling nickle and laid it flat on the table before him. “A fellow whose whole fortune is represented by a coin like that”—tapping the piece significantly—“is not as easily convinced as a man of your means, perhaps. But if I should be brought to own that I had made a mistake in my man, I should still feel myself justified in proceeding against him, since my very accusation of him seems to be enough to arouse such interest on the part of his friends.”
“Wretch!” leaped to Mr. Sylvester’s lips, but he did not speak it. “His friends,” declared he, “have most certainly a great interest in his reputation and his happiness; but they never will pay anything upon coercion to preserve the one or to insure the other.”