All right, memorandum it was, for the time being.  Now then, in what business could she have been engaged where she found it necessary to keep memoranda of such inconsiderable sums?  Oh, Lord!  There were a million!  Paul had been walking on thin ice from the start; now it gave way beneath him, so he abandoned this train of thought and went back once more to the bundle of clothes.  Surely there was a clue concealed somewhere among them, if only he could find it.  They were poor clothes, and yet, judging by their cut, he fancied the girl had looked exceedingly well in them—­nay, even modish.  She had evidently spent much time on them, as the beautiful needlework attested.  At this point Anderson’s mind ran out on to thin ice again, so he reverted to the girl herself for the nth time.  She was Canadian, her hands were useful, there were tiny blood-blisters on the left thumb and index finger, and the skin was roughened and torn minutely, evidently by some sharp instrument.  What instrument?  He answered the question almost before he had voiced it.  A needle, of course!

Paul stopped in his walk so abruptly that a man poked him in the back with a ladder; but he paid no heed, for his mind was leaping.  That thickening of the skin, those tiny scratches, those blood-blisters, those garments without mark of maker, yet so stylish in cut and so carefully made, and furthermore that memorandum: 

9.25 6.25 ——­ 3.00

“Why, she was a dressmaker!” said Anderson, out loud.  He went back over his reasoning, but it held good—­so good that he would have wagered his own clothes that he was right.  Yes, and those figures represented some trifling purchases or commission—­for a customer, no doubt.

It followed naturally that she was not a Buffalo dressmaker, else she would have been identified long since; nor was it likely that she came from any city, for her clothes had not given him the impression of being city-made, and, moreover, the publicity given to the case through the press, even allowing for the fact that the printed description had been vague, would have been sure to uncover her identity.  No, she was a Canadian country seamstress.

The young man’s mind went back a few years to his boyhood on a Michigan farm, where visiting dressmakers used to come and stay by the week to make his mother’s clothes.  They usually carried a little flat trunk filled with patterns, yard sticks, forms, and other paraphernalia of the trade.  Paul remembered that the owners used to buy the cloths and materials at the country stores, and render a strict accounting thereof to his mother.  Well, where was the trunk that went with this country dressmaker?

The question of baggage had puzzled him from the start.  Had the girl been possessed of a grip or bundle of any kind at the time of her death that question would have been answered.  But there was absolutely nothing of the sort in her room.  Her complete lack of luggage had made him doubt, at first, that she was an out-of-town visitor; but, following his recent conclusions, he decided now that directly the opposite was true.  She had come to Buffalo with nothing but a trunk, otherwise she would have taken her hand-luggage with her to the Main Street rooming-house.  It remained to find that trunk.