It was the same face he had so recently sat vis-a-vis with in this very office, with one particular difference—the photograph was of a happy, loving girl, while the other had been the face of an anxious woman.
Mentally he noted this fact, while looking long and earnestly at the photograph.
“Well, what do you think of her?” asked Leslie.
He was a tall man, perhaps thirty-five years of age, not handsome, but with a face that won him friends everywhere, for Joe Leslie had a warm heart and was ready to champion the cause of any poor devil in distress.
“She’s handsome, Joe—a beauty.”
“Anyone can see that—look deeper, man.”
“I can see qualities there such as might make her a wife to be proud of, and whom any man might well hesitate to offend.”
At this Joe groaned.
The shrewd detective thought he had driven one nail home—that his allusion must have hit Leslie in a tender spot—but for once he made a mistake.
Just then he was not thinking of his own shortcomings—that groan was the result of mental agony brought about by something else.