“Barford on the Hudson,” she finished promptly.  Evidently she begrudged the time she was wasting on his imbecilities.

“That’s it; that’s it.  ’Way up in the Catskills, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know.  Those people are waiting, sir.  I shall really——­”

“One moment!  I want to buy something more for her.  But I’ll send it myself this time; I won’t bother you again.  Another dress, something bright and prettier than anything she has.  She’ll forgive me.  She’ll be glad to have it.”

“I don’t know, sir.”  The woman was really very much embarrassed.  She was honest to the core, and though she enjoyed seeing her goods disappear from the shelves, it wasn’t in her heart to take advantage of a man so old as this.  “I’m afraid she wouldn’t be pleased.  You see, it isn’t a fortnight since she bought and made up the one I sold her first, and she thought that a great extravagance.  Now with the gray——­”

“Are you speaking of the blue one?”

“No, it wasn’t blue.”

“What color was it?  Haven’t you a bit left to show me?  I should know better what to do, then.”

She pointed to a bolt of striped wool—­a little gaudy for a woman whose taste they had both been speaking of as inclined to the plain and somber.

“That?  But that’s bright enough.  I’ve never seen her in that.”

“She didn’t like it.  But something made her take it.  She wore it when she came in last.”

“She did!  Then I’m satisfied.  Thankee all the same.  Just give me a pair of gloves for her, and I’ll be getting on.”

She picked out a pair for him, and he trotted away, mumbling cheerily to himself as he passed between the counters.  But once in his taxi again, he concentrated all his thought on that bolt of striped dress-goods.  The colors were crimson and black, with a dot here and there of some lighter shade!  He took pains to fix it in his mind, for this was undoubtedly the dress she fled in—­an important clue to him, if this hunt should resolve itself into a chase with doubling and redoubling of the escaping quarry.

He spent the next two hours in acquainting himself with the location and some of the conditions of the town he now meant to visit.  Though he could not understand Madame Duclos’ reason for taking the name of a woman so well known as this Elvira Brown, there was something in this circumstance and the fact that the person so styled had been at that moment at the point of death, which called, as he felt, for personal investigation.  He hardly felt fit for any such purely speculative expedition as this; especially as he must do without the companionship, to say nothing of the assistance, of Sweetwater, whom he hardly felt justified in withdrawing from the task he had given him.  So he picked out a fellow named Perry; and together they took the West Shore into Greene County, where they stopped at a station from which a branch road ran to the small town whither the package addressed to Elvira Brown had preceded them.