He asked himself if by any possibility her perceptions were sufficiently keen to have suggested to her the explanation of his call there; and he replied to his own thought:
“If she is the sort of woman I have believed her to be she would not be deceived by the explanation I offered of my presence here. She would know at once that I did not come here by accident.”
However, if Juno knew or guessed such a thing, she did not show it at all.
She had acted throughout in a perfectly natural manner. The most critical could have had no fault to find with her conduct, or with her manner of receiving the detective.
The negress, Liza, entered the room a moment later, evidently sent there by her mistress, and the detective followed her to the room that had been assigned to him.
An old-fashioned teester bed, surmounted by a resplendent canopy, waited there to receive him, and he was tired enough to have taken advantage of its comforts at once; but another duty demanded his attention first.
From the lining of his coat, where he had cut a place to receive it, he drew forth several sheets of drawing paper; from another pocket, pencils; and then he drew forward under the light the drop leaf mahogany table, and set himself to work on a reproduction of the features of the beautiful woman who had entertained him so short a time.
He made a profile; he made a full view drawing; he made a three-quarters. He drew a picture of her standing; another sketch represented her in the saddle, as he had first seen her. Still another showed her seated in the low rocker in the sitting room where she had talked with him only a few moments.
In all he made eight sketches of Juno, for it was an art which his father had compelled him to acquire when he was learning to be a detective—to draw with great accuracy from memory.
When he had finished them and raised them before his eyes for his own inspection he nodded his head, well satisfied with the result he had achieved. He had eight fairly good likenesses of Juno to work with.