“You MUST tell me, Jane,” I exclaimed, with a cold shudder of terror, half guessing what she meant. “Don’t keep me in suspense. Let me know what it is. I’m accustomed to shocks now. I know I can stand them.”
Jane answered nothing directly. She only held out her coarse red hand and asked me, with a face growing pale as she spoke:
“Where’s that picture of the murder?”
I produced it from my box, trembling inwardly all over.
Jane darted one finger demonstratively at a point in the photograph.
“Whose hand is THAT?” she asked with a strange earnestness, putting her nail on the murderer’s.
The words escaped me in a cry of horror almost before I was aware of them:
“Aunt Emma’s!” I said, gasping. “I NEVER noticed it before.”
Then I drew back and stared at it in speechless awe and consternation.
It was quite, quite true. No use in denying it. The figure that escaped through the window was dressed in man’s clothes, to be sure, and as far as one could judge from the foreshortening and the peculiar stoop, had a man’s form and stature. But the hand was a woman’s—soft, and white, and delicate: nay more, the hand, as I said in my haste, was line for line Aunt Emma’s.