'Is it he?'
'It is, sir; I could swear to the Methodist preacher that talked to the poor gentleman and to me in the Birkenhead ferry anywhere in the world!'
They took him to the police-office. He went quietly, in absolute silence, only looking from time to time at the men who walked one on each side of him with a confused and helpless stare.
Thornton Carey, Mrs. Jenkins, and the woman, whose evidence Thornton Carey had skilfully hunted up during his short stay in Liverpool, exercising the ingenuity which subsequently won him many warm congratulations from Mr. Dunn's travelling companion, and whose evidence was the last link in the chain of identification which convicted Mr. Dunn of the crime committed by Trenton Warren, had reached the police-court some minutes in advance. The prisoner recognised his inoffensive fellow lodgers of the dining-room floor in Queen-street, Mayfair, with an irrepressible start, and spoke for the first time. 'Who are they?' he asked.
Thornton Carey replied: 'I am Thornton Carey, whose benefactor Mr. Griswold was; and this woman,' drawing forward Mrs. Jenkins, 'is your brother's widow--your brother whose blood is on your head. We represent your victims!'
The usual formalities were quickly accomplished; and when the prisoner was searched, it appeared that he would have done wisely had he yielded to that momentary temptation which had moved him to tear the letters which he had read in the train and to scatter them in fragments from the carriage window; for the letters in question were those written by Helen Griswold to her husband, and the photograph was that which the murdered man had carried in his pocket-book, and the murderer had robbed him of both.
'On the whole,' as Mr. Dunn's travelling companion remarked to Thornton Carey, as they walked away from the police-court together, 'it isn't often one has the handling of a case that fits together so satisfactorily; in this there isn't a loop-hole.'
[EPILOGUE]
During the weeks, now numbering months, of their intimate association, a strong mutual regard had sprung up between Thornton Carey and Mrs. Jenkins. The bereaved woman's character had a great attraction for Thornton, who thoroughly appreciated her sincerity, disinterestedness, and depth of feeling. The earnestness and vehemence of Mrs. Jenkins's grief for the loss of a husband who perhaps had not precisely merited her love or her sorrow had struck the young man by its pure womanliness, and her sound practical common sense had been of immense assistance to him in every detail of his task. Thus the relation between the two confederates, which, owing to the discrepancy between their respective social stations, might have been attended by a certain awkwardness and reserve, had, on the contrary, been frank and pleasant from the first, and had very soon merged into genuine unreserved confidence and intimacy.
Thornton Carey, though perhaps more deeply a student of books, was also an observer of human nature, and in his long talks with Mrs. Jenkins, when it was a relief for them both to escape from the great purpose and topic of their lives into byways of conversation, would question Mrs. Jenkins concerning her own history, and the scenes she had witnessed, the experiences she had undergone as the wife of a man whose life had been so shifting and shifty, so disreputable and sometimes hard, in that wonderful microcosm, the city of New York.