“Mais oui, monsieur,” she answered his unspoken question. “C’est bien Mademoiselle Turner. Ah, là là! the poor one, what have they done to her?”
Barbara looked terribly white and fragile. Her face had grown thin to emaciation, and there were deep blue lines under her eyes.
“Poor young lady,” said the nurse, “she’s got concussion of the brain, and it must have been a frightful blow that did it.”
When they left the ward Gimblet asked: “How was it Miss Turner was not recognised till to-day?”
“Well,” said the nurse, “you see the pictures in the papers aren’t very good, and her hair is so hidden by the bandages that it’s rather hard to see the likeness. But what really put us off here was the description of the clothes she was supposed to have been wearing. Of course no one ever thought of connecting her with a young lady in a white evening dress and a red opera cloak!”
“Why,” asked Jennins, “were those not the colours she wore?”
“Just wait a moment,” said the nurse; “I’ll show you her things.”
She hurried away and returned in a minute with a bundle of apparel.
“Look at them,” she said, and held them up for them to see. “Look at this old black coat and skirt; do you see how threadbare and old-fashioned it is? It isn’t even very clean. And this horrible hat,” she pointed to a battered straw, “it is almost in pieces; and the boots are, quite. Her underclothes were of such coarse, stiff calico that you would take them for workhouse things, and all darned and mended till you could hardly see the original stuff. The stockings weren’t even mended. They were just one large hole. And there was no blouse under the coat at all. Nothing but a chemise. How was one to imagine that this was the young lady who was being inquired for? There’s a tremendous amount in appearances, and she appeared to be the poorest of the poor.”
Gimblet seized upon the miserable garments and examined them eagerly. But they rendered him no information. Nothing was marked, the boots were odd ones and of a prehistoric age; there was no distinctive feature about any of the things.