Page:O'Higgins--The Adventures of Detective Barney.djvu/243

 any doubts of his stories to the boy himself. She was a wise woman. The whole neighborhood knew her to be such; and she had gained the reputation by her ability to keep her opinion of people to herself.

Barney might never have suspected her, if he had not become a detective. In his social set, a boy is so busy concealing the guilty secrets of his conscience from his elders that he has no time to develop his own perspicacity. He is so diligent in hiding that he does not sharpen his eyes for what others have hidden. But after Babbing had lectured him, whimsically, on the necessity of knowing when a man was lying to him, he had begun to watch and study the utterances he met with. And suddenly he found that he could guess what people were thinking. In the ordinary course of growth, he would have acquired the faculty imperceptibly, by the slow process of experience. It came to him, now, in a startling illumination.

And the first thing it showed him was his