With this addition to his audience, the old man’s manner changed and became a trifle more formal.  He related the fact, not generally known, of Mr. Roberts’ engagement to a young girl residing on Long Island, and how this was broken off immediately after the occurrence at the museum, seemingly from no other reason than the unhappy condition of mind in which he found himself, a condition added to if not explained by the pertinacity with which he had haunted the morgue and dwelt upon the image of the young girl who had perished under no random shot.

Here the old man paused, shrinking as much from what he had yet to say as they from the hearing of it.  It was not till the Chief Inspector had made him an encouraging gesture that he found the requisite courage to proceed.  He did so, in these words: 

“I know that the evidence I have thus far advanced is of a purely circumstantial nature, capable, perhaps, of a more or less satisfactory explanation.  But what I have to add cannot be so easily disposed of.  Connections have developed between persons we thought strangers which have opened up a field of inquiry which brings the doubts and surmises of an old detective within the scope of this office.  I do not know what to make of them; perhaps their full meaning can only be found out here.  Of this only I am assured.  The gentleman whom it seems presumptuous on my part to connect even in a casual way with crime has not gained but lost by what I have to tell of Madame Duclos’ suicidal death.  To those who see no association between the two, it looks like the opening of a new lead, but when I tell you that they knew each other, or at all events that she knew him and in the way of actual hatred, it looks more like a deepening of the old one.  See here, gentlemen.”

Opening a package he had hitherto held in hand, he showed them Fredericks’ fifteen-year-old photograph of Mr. Roberts, together with its mutilated counterpart, and explained how the latter came to be in its present mutilated condition.

“But this is not all,” he continued, as the remarks incident upon this proof of deadly hatred on the part of the mother of the victim for the man whom circumstances seemed to point out as her slayer subsided under the pressure of their interest in what he had further to impart.  “As you will see after a moment’s consideration, this token of animosity does not explain Madame Duclos’ flight, and certainly not her death, which, as the unhappy witness of it, I am ready to declare was not the death of one driven to extremity from personal fear, but by some exalted feeling which we have yet to understand.  All that I now wish to point out in its connection is the proof offered by this shattered photograph, that Mr. Roberts was in some manner and from some cause a party to this crime from which a superficial observation would completely dissociate him.