"But since you've made it," he continued coldly, "I'll tell you that this
is not my meaning."
He paused, with a straight glance of his sunken eyes which was a full
equivalent of the unspoken termination "and you know it." The head of
the so-called Special Crimes Department debarred by his position from
going out of doors personally in quest of secrets locked up in guilty
breasts, had a propensity to exercise his considerable gifts for the
detection of incriminating truth upon his own subordinates. That
peculiar instinct could hardly be called a weakness. It was natural. He
was a born detective. It had unconsciously governed his choice of a
career, and if it ever failed him in life it was perhaps in the one
exceptional circumstance of his marriage--which was also natural. It
fed, since it could not roam abroad, upon the human material which was
brought to it in its official seclusion. We can never cease to be
ourselves.
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