As soon as the door was closed and locked on the inside, Thorndyke glanced curiously round the bare, whitewashed building.  A stream of sunlight poured in through the skylight, and fell upon the silent form that lay so still under its covering-sheet, and one stray beam glanced into a corner by the door, where, on a row of pegs and a deal table, the dead woman’s clothing was displayed.

“There is something unspeakably sad in these poor relics, Jervis,” said Thorndyke, as we stood before them.  “To me they are more tragic, more full of pathetic suggestion, than the corpse itself.  See the smart, jaunty hat, and the costly skirts hanging there, so desolate and forlorn; the dainty lingerie on the table, neatly folded—­by the mortuary-man’s wife, I hope—­the little French shoes and open-work silk stockings.  How pathetically eloquent they are of harmless, womanly vanity, and the gay, careless life, snapped short in the twinkling of an eye.  But we must not give way to sentiment.  There is another life threatened, and it is in our keeping.”

He lifted the hat from its peg, and turned it over in his hand.  It was, I think, what is called a “picture-hat”—­a huge, flat, shapeless mass of gauze and ribbon and feather, spangled over freely with dark-blue sequins.  In one part of the brim was a ragged hole, and from this the glittering sequins dropped off in little showers when the hat was moved.

“This will have been worn tilted over on the left side,” said Thorndyke, “judging by the general shape and the position of the hole.”

“Yes,” I agreed.  “Like that of the Duchess of Devonshire in Gainsborough’s portrait.”

“Exactly.”

He shook a few of the sequins into the palm of his hand, and, replacing the hat on its peg, dropped the little discs into an envelope, on which he wrote, “From the hat,” and slipped it into his pocket.  Then, stepping over to the table, he drew back the sheet reverently and even tenderly from the dead woman’s face, and looked down at it with grave pity.  It was a comely face, white as marble, serene and peaceful in expression, with half-closed eyes, and framed with a mass of brassy, yellow hair; but its beauty was marred by a long linear wound, half cut, half bruise, running down the right cheek from the eye to the chin.

“A handsome girl,” Thorndyke commented—­“a dark-haired blonde.  What a sin to have disfigured herself so with that horrible peroxide.”  He smoothed the hair back from her forehead, and added:  “She seems to have applied the stuff last about ten days ago.  There is about a quarter of an inch of dark hair at the roots.  What do you make of that wound on the cheek?”

“It looks as if she had struck some sharp angle in falling, though, as the seats are padded in first-class carriages, I don’t see what she could have struck.”