"Because there could be no reason for concealment. As it is, she remains silent. Why? Because there has been substitution instead of adoption. She has put forward another baby in the place and in the name of the dead child."
"How can you prove that?"
"I don't know, Molly. I believe I have missed my vocation. I am a sleuth-hound. Give me a clue; put me on the scent, and let me rip."
His face hardened; his features grew sharper; his eyes keener; he bent his neck forward; he was no longer the musician; he was the bloodhound looking for the scent. The acting instinct in him made him while he spoke adapt his face and his expression to the new part he played. To look the part is, if you consider, essential.
[CHAPTER XV.]
TWO JUMPS AND A CONCLUSION.
The advertisements produced no answer except from persons hoping to make money by the case—such as the railway porter, who could swear to the baby, the lady who was really the mother, or the detective who wanted a good long-staying job. There seemed no hope or help from the advertisement. Well, then, what next?
By this time Richard Woodroffe, though never before engaged upon this kind of business, found himself so much interested in the subject that he could think of nothing else. He occupied himself with putting the case into a statement, which he kept altering. He carried himself back in imagination to the transference of the baby; he saw the doctor taking it from the mother and giving it to an ayah in the railway station. And there he stopped.
His friend Sir Robert was the doctor—his friend Sir Robert, who knew all the theatrical and show folk, as well as the royal princes and the dukes and illustrious folk. Well, he knew this physician well enough to be certain that a secret was as safe behind those steady, deep-set eyes as with any father confessor. That square chin did not belong to a garrulous temper, that big brain was a treasury of family secrets; he knew where all the skeletons were kept; this was only one of a thousand secrets; his patients told him everything—that was, of course, because he was a specialist in nervous disorders, which have a good deal to do with family and personal secrets. Fortunately, personal secrets are not family secrets.