“You know her rather well?”

“Quite well.”

“Your manner says ‘Drop it,’” observed Burns, with a keen glance at a side-face clean-cut against the landscape.  “I’ve encountered that manner before, and I’ll take warning accordingly.  This is a fine day, and it’s rather an interesting case I’m going to see, up this road.  If you care to come in I’ll be glad of your opinion, but I won’t insist on it.”

“Unless you really wish it, I’ll stay out, thank you.”

Burns left his companion in the car, open book in hand.  It was a book Red Pepper had strongly recommended, with the motive of stirring up his friend to interested resentment,—­a particularly unfair and prejudiced discussion of a subject just then being torn to pieces by all manner of disputants, with the issue still very much in doubt.  He knew precisely the place Leaver had reached in his reading, and noted, as he got out of the car, the page at which he was about to begin.  The page was one easily recognizable, for it was one upon whose margin he himself had drawn, in a moment of intense irritation with the argument advanced thereon, a rough outline of a donkey’s head with impossibly long and obstinate ears.

He left Leaver with eyes bent upon the page, not the semblance of a smile touching his grave mouth at sight of the really striking and effective cartoon which so ably expressed a former reader’s sentiments.  Burns went into the house making with himself a wager as to how far Leaver’s perusal of the chapter would have progressed in the ten minutes which would suffice for the visit, and was divided whether to stake a page against a half-chapter, or to risk his friend’s being aware of his observation and leaping through the chapter to its end.

When he came out the book was closed and lying upon Leaver’s knee.  Burns took his place and drove off, malice sparkling in his eye.

“What did you think of that chapter?” he inquired.

“Interesting argument, but weak in spots.”

“Hm—­m.  Which spots?”

Leaver indicated them.  There could be no doubt that he had read the chapter carefully to the end.  Burns put him through a severe cross-examination, but he stood the test, much to his examiner’s disgust.  In detective work it is usually irritating to have one’s theories disproved.  But he still doubted the evidence of his ears.  Either John Leaver was a colder blooded deceiver than he thought him, or his powers of concentration were more than ordinarily great, that he could turn from the contemplation of a subject like the one left at the cross-roads corner, a subject which Burns was pretty sure vitally concerned him, to a mere abstract discussion of a modern sociological problem, bare of practical illustration, and dealing purely with one man’s notions not yet worked out to any constructive conclusion.

“Well,” said Leaver, turning suddenly to look at Burns with a smile, “are you satisfied that I have read the chapter?”