“I’ll admit that,” I said; “but, now, why two daughters?  And how, in the name of all the prophets, did you guess that one was adopted when he told you he had three?”

“Don’t say guess,” said Jolnes, with a touch of pride in his air; “there is no such word in the lexicon of ratiocination.  In Major Ellison’s buttonhole there was a carnation and a rosebud backed by a geranium leaf.  No woman ever combined a carnation and a rosebud into a boutonniere.  Close your eyes, Whatsup, and give the logic of your imagination a chance.  Cannot you see the lovely Adele fastening the carnation to the lapel so that papa may be gay upon the street?  And then the romping Edith May dancing up with sisterly jealousy to add her rosebud to the adornment?”

“And then,” I cried, beginning to feel enthusiasm, “when he declared that he had three daughters—­”

“I could see,” said Jolnes, “one in the background who added no flower; and I knew that she must be—­”

“Adopted!” I broke in.  “I give you every credit; but how did you know he was leaving for the South to-night?”

“In his breast pocket,” said the great detective, “something large and oval made a protuberance.  Good liquor is scarce on trains, and it is a long journey from New York to Fairfax County.”

“Again, I must bow to you,” I said.  “And tell me this, so that my last shred of doubt will be cleared away; why did you decide that he was from Virginia?”

“It was very faint, I admit,” answered Shamrock Jolnes, “but no trained observer could have failed to detect the odour of mint in the car.”

XIX

THE LADY HIGHER UP

New York City, they said, was deserted; and that accounted, doubtless, for the sounds carrying so far in the tranquil summer air.  The breeze was south-by-southwest; the hour was midnight; the theme was a bit of feminine gossip by wireless mythology.  Three hundred and sixty-five feet above the heated asphalt the tiptoeing symbolic deity on Manhattan pointed her vacillating arrow straight, for the time, in the direction of her exalted sister on Liberty Island.  The lights of the great Garden were out; the benches in the Square were filled with sleepers in postures so strange that beside them the writhing figures in Dore’s illustrations of the Inferno would have straightened into tailor’s dummies.  The statue of Diana on the tower of the Garden—­its constancy shown by its weathercock ways, its innocence by the coating of gold that it has acquired, its devotion to style by its single, graceful flying scarf, its candour and artlessness by its habit of ever drawing the long bow, its metropolitanism by its posture of swift flight to catch a Harlem train—­remained poised with its arrow pointed across the upper bay.  Had that arrow sped truly and horizontally it would have passed fifty feet above the head of the heroic matron whose duty it is to offer a cast-ironical welcome to the oppressed of other lands.