"Yes, sir."
"How do you recognize them?"
"Because his initials are worked in two places. I worked them myself, and can swear to them."
"You cannot recognize the body, nurse?"
"I do not believe it is the body of my young master," she said; "his hair was lovely—long and silky. What hair remains on the body is very short, and what I should call stubbly."
"But the hair might have been cut short by the people who stole him," the coroner said. "It is the first precaution they would take to evade the search that would at once be set on foot."
"Yes, sir, but I don't think that it would have grown up so stiff."
"My experience of workhouse children," the coroner remarked, "is that whatever the hair they may have had when they entered the house, it is stiff enough to stand upright when cut close to the head. There is nothing else, is there, which leads you to doubt the identity of the child?"
"No, sir, I cannot say that there is; but I don't believe that it is Master Walter's body."
Hilda, Netta, and Mr. Pettigrew all gave their evidence. The two former stated that they identified the clothes, but, upon the same ground as the nurse, they failed to recognize the body as that of Walter Rivington. All were asked if they could in any way account for the finding of the child's body there. The question had been foreseen, and they said that, although they had used every means of discovering the child, they had obtained no clew whatever as to his whereabouts from the time that he was stolen to the time they were summoned to identify the body.