y Father Brown's view was obscured
altogether; for the City magnate in front of him rose to his full height
and thrust his hands savagely into all his pockets. Then he sat down
nervously, still fumbling, and then stood up again. For an instant it
seemed seriously likely that he would stride across the footlights; then
he turned a glare at the clown playing the piano; and then he burst in
silence out of the room.

The priest had only watched for a few more minutes the absurd but not
inelegant dance of the amateur harlequin over his splendidly unconscious
foe. With real though rude art, the harlequin danced slowly backwards
out of the door into the garden, which was full of moonlight and
stillness. The vamped dress of silver paper and paste, which had been
too glaring in the footlights, looked more and more magical and silvery
as it danced away under a brilliant moon. The audience was closing in
with a cataract of applause, when Brown felt his arm abruptly touched,
and he was asked in a whisper to come into the colonel's study.

He followed his summoner with increasing doubt, which was not dispelled
by a solemn comicality in the scene of the study. There sat Colonel
Adams, still unaffectedly dressed as a pantaloon, with the knobbed
whalebone nodding above his brow, but with his poor old eyes sad enough
to have sobered a Saturnalia. Sir Leopold Fischer was leaning against
the mantelpiece and heaving with all the importance of panic.

"This is a very painful matter, Father Brown," said Adams. "The truth
is, those diamonds we all saw this afternoon seem to have vanished from
my friend's tail-coat pocket. And as you--"

"As I," supplemented Father Brown, with a broad grin, "was sitting just
behind him--"

"Nothing of the sort shall be suggested," said Colonel Adams, with a
firm look at Fischer, which rather implied that some such thing had been
suggested. "I only ask you to give me the assistance that any gentleman
might give."

"Which is turning out his pockets," said Father Brown, and proceeded to
do so, displaying seven and sixpence, a return ticket, a small silver
crucifix, a small breviary, and a stick of chocolate.

The colonel looked at him long, and then said, "Do you know, I should
like to see the inside of your head more than the inside of your
pockets. My daughter is one of your people, I know; well, she has
lately--" and he stopped.

"She has lately," cried out old Fischer, "opened her father's house to