"Something is going on inside there," the old man said to himself. He
waited patiently, on the pretext of business, until Mr. Bradshaw got up
and left the office. As soon as he and the senior partner were alone,
Master Gridley took a lazy look at some of the books in his library.
There stood in the book-shelves a copy of the Corpus Juris Civilis,--the
fine Elzevir edition of 1664. It was bound in parchment, and thus
readily distinguishable at a glance from all the books round it. Now Mr.
Penhallow was not much of a Latin scholar, and knew and cared very little
about the civil law. He had fallen in with this book at an auction, and
bought it to place in his shelves with the other "properties" of the
office, because it would look respectable. Anything shut up in one of
those two octavos might stay there a lifetime without Mr. Penhallow's
disturbing it; that Master Gridley knew, and of course the young man knew
it too.

We often move to the objects of supreme curiosity or desire, not in the
lines of castle or bishop on the chess-board, but with the knight's
zigzag, at first in the wrong direction, making believe to ourselves we
are not after the thing coveted. Put a lump of sugar in a canary-bird's
cage, and the small creature will illustrate the instinct for the benefit
of inquirers or sceptics. Byles Gridley went to the other side of the
room and took a volume of Reports from the shelves. He put it back and
took a copy of "Fearne on Contingent Remainders," and looked at that for
a moment in an idling way, as if from a sense of having nothing to do.
Then he drew the back of his forefinger along the books on the shelf, as
if nothing interested him in them, and strolled to the shelf in front of
the desk at which Murray Bradshaw had stood. He took down the second
volume of the Corpus Juris Civilis, turned the leaves over mechanically,
as if in search of some title, and replaced it.