The sincerity of Madame Dumois' search, whatever her ultimate motive might be, was unquestionable. She could serve no object by deliberately eliminating so conspicuous a detail from her description, and it was incredible that she could have forgotten it, had the young woman she sought possessed such a means of recognition.
His taxi slewed recklessly through the mud as it rounded a corner into the North Drive and he glanced idly out of the window at a square stone house, half-hidden in a grove of cedars past which he was being rapidly whirled. A figure which appeared to be loitering beside the gate turned at the sound of the motor and for an instant his face loomed with almost grotesque distinctness against the enveloping dusk.
Herbert Ross uttered a sharp exclamation, and starting forward in his seat, reached for the speaking tube. The next moment he had checked the impulse and sunk back once more, but his round, candid eyes had narrowed to mere slits in each of which a steely point glittered and his jaw was set in a grim line of dogged relentlessness.
Some half-mile further down the Drive, his taxi turned in at the modest ivy-clad gate of an estate smaller than its pretentious neighbors, but surrounded with an air of solid, unchanging antiquity which they could not boast.
A white-haired butler opened the door and ushered Herbert Ross ceremoniously into the drawing-room. It was a long, narrow apartment, stiff and ugly with the prim austerity of the mid-Victorian period from which it obviously dated, and the conservative handful of coals in the grate served only to accentuate the chill and gloom in the lurking shadows beyond its proscribed radius.
Madame Dumois appeared with businesslike promptitude.
"Have you news for me, Mr. Ross?" She regarded him shrewdly as she extended her hand. "Or are you going to try to wheedle some more information from me? If you are, you may spare yourself the trouble. I admit that the surprise of encountering a detective who talked Persian poetry loosened my tongue the other day but you have all the data I can give you to help you locate the young woman, and what takes place between us when you have found her, will be my affair."
"Are you sure that I really have all the data, Madame Dumois?" he asked earnestly. "Is there not something that you have forgotten or purposely withheld, which would be a distinctive means of recognition?"
"I don't know what you mean!" Her voice was guarded, but her eyes snapped with sudden fire. "You have a description of the young woman's appearance, together with a lot of quite irrelevant detail which I was a babbling fool to disclose—"
"Have I?" he insisted. "You have given me a description which would fit probably four-fifths of the young women one meets, without a single distinguishing feature. Has she none? Think, please. The smallest scar, or physical peculiarity would be of inestimable value in identification."