“What, Sweetwater?”

“A well-founded distrust.  Mr. Gryce, I’m going to ask you a question.”

“Ask away.  Ask fifty if you want to.”

“No; the one may involve fifty, but it is big enough in itself to hold our attention for a while.  Did you ever hear of a case before, that in some of its details was similar to this?”

“No, it stands alone.  That’s why it is so puzzling.”

“You forget.  The wealth, beauty and social consequence of the present victim has blinded you to the strong resemblance which her case bears to one you know, in which the sufferer had none of the worldly advantages of Miss Challoner.  I allude to—­”

“Wait! the washerwoman in Hicks Street!  Sweetwater, what have you got up your sleeve?  You do mean that Brooklyn washerwoman, don’t you?”

“The same.  The Department may have forgotten it, but I haven’t.  Mr. Gryce, there’s a startling similarity in the two cases if you study the essential features only.  Startling, I assure you.”

“Yes, you are right there.  But what if there is?  We were no more successful in solving that case than we have been in solving this.  Yet you look and act like a hound which has struck a hot scent.”  The young man smoothed his features with an embarrassed laugh.

“I shall never learn,” said he, “not to give tongue till the hunt is fairly started.  If you will excuse me we’ll first make sure of the similarity I have mentioned.  Then I’ll explain myself.  I have some notes here, made at the time it was decided to drop the Hicks Street case as a wholly inexplicable one.  As you know, I never can bear to say ‘die,’ and I sometimes keep such notes as a possible help in case any such unfinished matter should come up again.  Shall I read them?”

“Do.  Twenty years ago it would not have been necessary.  I should have remembered every detail of an affair so puzzling.  But my memory is no longer entirely reliable.  So fire away, my boy, though I hardly see your purpose or what real bearing the affair in Hicks Street has upon the Clermont one.  A poor washerwoman and the wealthy Miss Challoner!  True, they were not unlike in their end.”

“The connection will come later,” smiled the young detective, with that strange softening of his features which made one at times forget his extreme plainness.  “I’m sure you will not consider the time lost if I ask you to consider the comparison I am about to make, if only as a curiosity in criminal annals.”

And he read: 

“’On the afternoon of December Fourth, 1910, the strong and persistent screaming of a young child in one of the rooms of a rear tenement in Hicks Street, Brooklyn, drew the attention of some of the inmates and led them, after several ineffectual efforts to gain an entrance, to the breaking in of the door which had been fastened on the inside by an old-fashioned door-button.

“’The tenant whom all knew for an honest, hard-working woman, had not infrequently fastened her door in this manner, in order to safeguard her child who was abnormally active and had a way of rattling the door open when it was not thus secured.  But she had never refused to open before, and the child’s cries were pitiful.