“That is all right, old girl. You just keep quiet and leave it to me. She can't give you any explanation. That is just all she can say,” he went on in a determined, almost a hostile voice. “As soon as she saw that portrait, she knew, if that was Luke Bechcombe, that she never saw him at all on the day of his death—that she gave the diamonds to some one else, some one impersonating him.”
“And who,” inquired John Steadman in that quiet, lazy voice of his, “do you imagine could have impersonated Luke Bechcombe?”
The American looked him squarely in the eyes.
“That's for you legal gentlemen to decide. It is not for me to come butting in. But I can put you wise on one thing that stares one right in the face, so to speak, that I can say before I quit. I don't guess who it was who impersonated Luke Bechcombe, or where he came from or how he got right there. But there is only one man it could have been, and that is the murderer!”
Chapter XV
He looked from one to another as he spoke and as he met John Steadman's glance his grey eyes were as hard as steel and his thin lips were drawn and pinched together like a trap.
The horror in his hearers' faces grew and strengthened. Mrs. Bechcombe alone tried to speak; she leaned forward; in some inscrutable fashion her figure seemed to have shrunk in the last few minutes. She looked bent and worn and old, ten years older than Luke Bechcombe's handsome wife had done. Her face was white and rigid and set like a death-mask. Only her eyes, vivid, burning, looked alive. No sound came from her parted lips for a moment, then with a hoarse croak she threw up her hands to her throat as though she would tear the very words out:
“What was he like?”
Mrs. Carnthwacke cast one glance at her and began to tremble all over, then she clutched violently at her husband's hand.
“It—it is easier to say that he wasn't like that portrait,” she confessed, “than to tell you what he really was like. He gave me the impression that he was a bigger man; his beard too was not neat and trimmed like that—short, stubby and untidy-looking. His hair grew low down on his forehead. That—that man's hair,” pointing with shaking fingers to the paper portrait, “grows far back. He is even a little bald. I don't know that I can point out any other differences, but the two faces are not a bit alike really. Oh, if I had only known Mr. Bechcombe by sight this dreadful thing might never have happened!” She leaned back in her chair trembling violently.