“Would you call that a reasonably good picture of your late husband, ma'am?”
Mrs. Bechcombe drew her eyebrows together as she bent over it.
“Yes, it is—very,” she said decidedly. “I should say unusually good for this class of paper. It is copied from one of the last photographs he had taken, one he sat for when we were staying with his sister in the country. You remember, James?” appealing to the rector.
Mr. Collyer smiled sadly.
“Indeed I do. We were all sitting on the lawn and that friend of Tony's, Leonard Barnes, insisted on taking us all. Poor Luke's was particularly good. Why are you asking, Mr. Carnthwacke?”
Carnthwacke wagged his yellow forefinger reprovingly in the direction of the rector.
“One moment, reverend sir. It may be, ma'am, that you have another portrait of your lamented husband that you could let us glimpse?”
Mrs. Bechcombe hesitated a moment and glanced nervously at John Steadman. In spite of all her preconceived notions, the American was beginning to impress her. There was something in his manner, restrained yet with a sinister undercurrent, that filled her with a sense of some hitherto unguessed-at, unnamable dread. At last, moving like a woman in a dream, she went across to the writing-table that stood between the two tall windows overlooking the square, and unlocking a drawer took out a cabinet photograph.
“There, that is the most recent, and I think the best we have. It was taken at Frank and Burrows, the big photographers in Baker Street.”
“Allow me, ma'am.” Cyril B. Carnthwacke held out his hand. He studied the photograph silently for a minute or two, laying it beside the paper and apparently comparing the two. Everybody in the room watched him with curious, interested eyes. His wife sat crouching against the table, leaning over it, her handkerchief, crushed into a hard little ball, pressed against her lips.