“Can you recall in the stranger, Clayton, as you now remember him, any characteristic in voice, figure, or manner of speech, resembling that of either of the masked men whom you encountered three months ago?” Nick inquired.
“I cannot say that I do, Nick.”
“Well, one fact is obvious,” said the detective. “If you are not mentally wrong, Clayton, and I see no indications of it, and if your statements are true, of which I personally have not the slightest doubt, this crime was committed by a man closely resembling——”
Nick was interrupted by a quick, insistent knock on the hall door.
Mademoiselle Falloni’s maid, who then was standing near by, hastened to open it.
Madame Escobar uttered a cry, with countenance lighting, and started up from her chair.
“Courage!” she cried, addressing Mademoiselle Falloni. “Some one brings news—good news, perhaps! Courage, Helena!”
Instead, however, a stately woman in black swept into the room, a remarkably handsome woman in the fifties, but whose hair was prematurely gray, and the gravity of whose refined, almost classical face denoted that her life had not been one of all sunshine. She was fashionably clad and in street attire.
Clayton sprang up to meet her, crying impulsively:
“My mother! I did not dream it was you.”