Page:O'Higgins--The Adventures of Detective Barney.djvu/31

 “Are you in the habit of opening letters that are given you to deliver?”

“No, sir.”

“Don’t smile so much. You overdo it,” Babbing said, without looking up. And his merely professional tone of matter-of-fact advice sobered Barney as suddenly as if he had said: “I understand, of course, that you have found your smile very effective, but it does n’t deceive me. You ’re not so bland a child as you pretend, and I shall not treat you as if you were.”

Barney shifted uncomfortably on his feet. The absent-minded ease with which Babbing had plied him with questions and caught up his answers made him fearful for the approach of the moment when the detective should give him a concentrated attention and begin forcibly to ransack him and turn him inside out.

Babbing asked unexpectedly: “How tall are you?”

“About five feet,” Barney answered at a guess.