"I can," said Christina, almost tartly. "White—everybody's in white. I wore a white dress that night, myself. It wasn't Nancy. You may put that out of your mind."
Herrick considered. "That business of the variegated eyes—people seem to suppose he threw it in for good measure. But could such an effect be produced by make-up?"
"I think not. On the stage we generally use blue pencil to darken our lashes. Well, once in a way, some one from the front assures us that we have blue eyes. Or else brown, if we use brown. But close to, and—and in combination—surely not! And why try so thin a disguise?"
"To suggest a striking mark of identification which does not really exist. That would explain so much. Why she was willing to make a conspicuous impression on the boy—she may have been a dark woman, you know, in a red wig, only too glad to leave behind her the picture of a blonde. There always lingers the impression that it may have been some one whom Joe knew, or was used to seeing, and that it was merely this vague familiarity which he recognized before he had time to be taken in by her disguise. Ingham was on his mind; that may have been why he first thought of you.—Miss Hope, do you know what other impression, or superstition, or whatever you like, I can't get rid of? That the mystery of who fired the shot is part of the answer to the mystery of that bolted door. When we know how he got out, we shall know who he was."
"He?"
"Well—man or woman. It's ridiculous, it's silly, but I feel as if that personality were somehow still imprisoned in those rooms. As though, if we knew how to look, it would be there and there only we should find the truth."
Christina murmured a soft sound of regret and wonder. "What a strange thing! His poor mother—she feels so, too! She won't have a thing in his rooms touched till the lease is up. She says the secret is still there."
He loved the pity in Christina's face. And then he watched her reabsorption in the letters. But though they absorbed, they did not impress her. They somehow seemed even to bring her mind relief. "Heavens!" said she, presently. "Is it altogether a bad joke?—'The Arm of Justice!'"
"I did think at first they were a hoax of some sort. But the Inghams are far from thinking so."
"They think—?"