is
forehead completed the sentence more significantly than words.

The figure on the bed in the corner was in the shadow, but they could
make it out to be that of an old and shrivelled woman in a grey flannel
nightdress, who was sitting up in bed, swinging backward and forward,
holding some object in her arms, clasped tightly to her breast, while
her small dark eyes, deepset under furrowed brows, gazed at the visitors
with the unmeaning stare of an animal.

But Colwyn's eyes were drawn to the girl at the bedside. She was
beautiful, of a type sufficiently rare to attract attention anywhere.
Her delicate profile and dainty grace shone in the shadow of the sordid
room like an exquisite picture. He was aware of a skin of transparent
whiteness, a wistful sensitive mouth, a pair of wonderful eyes with the
green-grey colour of the sea in their depths, and a crown of red-gold
hair. She was poorly, almost shabbily, dressed, but the crude cheap
garbing of a country dressmaker was unable to mar the graceful outlines
of her slim young figure. But it was the impassivity of the face and
detachment of attitude which chained Colwyn's attention and stimulated
his intellectual curiosity. The human face is usually an index to the
owner's character, but this girl's face was a mask which revealed
nothing. The features might have been marble for anything they
displayed, as she stood by the bedside regarding with grave inscrutable
eyes the group of men in the doorway. There was something pathetic in
the contrast between her grace and beauty and stillness and the uncouth
gestures and meaningless stare of the old woman in the bed behind her.

The old woman, moving from side to side with the unhappy restlessness
which characterises the insane, dropped over the side of the bed the
object she had been nursing in her arms, and looked at the girl with the
dumb entreaty of an animal. The girl stooped down by the side of the
bed, picked up the fallen article, and restored it to the mad woman. It
was a doll.

Mr. Cromering, who saw the action and the article, flushed like a man
who had seen something which should be kept secret, and turned to leave
the room. The others followed, and immediately afterwards they heard the
door closed after them, and the key turned in the lock.

Superintendent Galloway, who had more of the inquiring turn of mind of
the police official than the chief constable, asked the innkeeper
several questions about his mother an