A. E. W. Mason

“ One or two small boxes of Battersea enamel and a flat glass case alone decorated it. Hanaud crossed to the mantelshelf and, after a moment's inspection, lifted, with a low whistle of admiration, the flat glass case.
"You will pardon me, Mademoiselle," he said to. Betty. "But I shall probably never in my life have the luck to see anything so incomparable again. And the mantelshelf is a little high for me to see it properly."
Without waiting for the girl's consent he carried it towards the window.
"Do you see this, Monsieur Frobisher?" he called out, and Jim went forward to his side. ”

“ The ashes which you see there, Monsieur Hanaud, are the ashes of the letters which I burnt upon the Sunday morning."
Betty spoke with a very pretty and simple dignity which touched her audience to a warm sympathy. Hanaud gently tilted the ashes back into the grate.
"Mademoiselle, I am always in the wrong with you," he said with an accent of remorse. "For I am always forcing you to statements which make me ashamed and do you honour."
Jim acknowledged that Hanaud, when he wished, could do the handsome thing with a very good grace. Unfortunately grace seemed never to be an enduring quality in him ”

“ Jim had not a doubt that he was thinking of them now. One had only to say "letters," and he was side-tracked at once, apparently ready to accuse anyone of their authorship.
"They were quite private letters," Betty replied, whilst the colour slowly stained her cheeks. "They will not help you."
"So I see," Hanaud returned, with just a touch of a snarl in his voice as he shook the shovel and flung the ashes back into the grate. "But I am asking you, Mademoiselle, what kind of letters these were." ”

“ She arranged it, and when she saw who her visitors were she stood up with a start of surprise."
"Aha!" said Hanaud cordially. He smiled at Betty. "This evidence is just as valuable as if he had told us that he had seen the ashes themselves."
He rose to his feet and went close to her.
"But there is another letter which you were good enough to promise to me," he said.
"The an——" she began, and Hanaud stopped her hurriedly.
"It is better that we hold our tongues," he said with a nod and a grin which recognized that in this matter they were accomplices. ”

“ They were the heads of Indian tribesmen killed upon the banks of the Amazon, and preserved and reduced by their conquerors by the process common amongst those forests.
"If the arrow is anywhere in this room, it is here that we should find it," he said, but though he found many curious oddities in that cabinet, of the perfect specimen of a poison arrow there was never a trace. ”