“I guess that lets her out,” decided Larry. “But can you recollect what sort of a man it was to whom you sold this valise, Miss Mason?”
The girl was racking her memory, and trying hard to think. Larry was desperately nervous, for he felt, after all his work, that he was at last on the beginning of the trail. Most unexpectedly he had hit upon it.
“Try! Try!” he whispered to Miss Mason.
She smiled at him.
“I’d like to oblige you,” she said, “for you were very kind to me. But I don’t want to give you misleading information.”
“No, that would be worse than none,” declared Larry. “But if I could get some sort of description of the man, I might be able to——”
Suddenly Miss Mason clutched the arm of the young reporter. They were alone in an aisle of the trunk department, for the other girls had gone to different parts of the floor.
“Look! Look!” the girl whispered. “If this isn’t a coincidence! I never could have described the man to you who purchased that valise, for I haven’t a very good memory for faces, but, unless I’m greatly mistaken, there he stands now!”
She pointed to a man with his back toward herself and Larry. A man who, even from this unsatisfactory view, seemed strangely familiar to the young reporter.
“There he is! There’s the man who bought the valise!” whispered Miss Mason.