pay back if he could. He's a dirty little scamp, though he is Mrs.
Quinton's brother, and she's as fine a woman as ever walked."

"Yes," said Father Brown. "She's a good woman."

"So I propose to hang about the garden till the creature has cleared
off," went on the doctor, "and then I'll go in to Quinton with the
medicine. Atkinson can't get in, because I locked the door."

"In that case, Dr. Harris," said Flambeau, "we might as well walk round
at the back by the end of the conservatory. There's no entrance to it
that way, but it's worth seeing, even from the outside."

"Yes, and I might get a squint at my patient," laughed the doctor, "for
he prefers to lie on an ottoman right at the end of the conservatory
amid all those blood-red poinsettias; it would give me the creeps. But
what are you doing?"

Father Brown had stopped for a moment, and picked up out of the long
grass, where it had almost been wholly hidden, a queer, crooked Oriental
knife, inlaid exquisitely in coloured stones and metals.

"What is this?" asked Father Brown, regarding it with some disfavour.

"Oh, Quinton's, I suppose," said Dr. Harris carelessly; "he has all
sorts of Chinese knickknacks about the place. Or perhaps it belongs to
that mild Hindoo of his whom he keeps on a string."

"What Hindoo?" asked Father Brown, still staring at the dagger in his
hand.

"Oh, some Indian conjuror," said the doctor lightly; "a fraud, of
course."

"You don't believe in magic?" asked Father Brown, without looking up.

"O crickey! magic!" said the doctor.

"It's very beautiful," said the priest in a low, dreaming voice; "the
colours are very beautiful. But it's the wrong shape."

"What for?" asked Flambeau, staring.

"For anything. It's the wrong shape in the abstract. Don't you ever feel
that about Eastern art? The colours are intoxicatingly lovely; but the
shapes are mean and bad--deliberately mean and bad. I have seen wicked
things in a Turkey carpet."

"Mon Dieu!" cried Flambeau, laughing.

"They are letters and symbols in a language I don't know; but I know
they stand for evil words," went on the priest, his voice growing lower
and lower. "The lines go wrong on purpose--like serpents doubling to
escape."

"What the devil are you talking about?" said the doctor with a loud
laugh.

Flambeau spoke quietly to him in answer. "The Father sometimes gets this
mystic's cloud on him," he said; "but I give you fair warning that I
have never known h