But it did not.  As soon as the description was received from Mrs. Amidon (a description, by the way, which was unusually clear and precise, owing to the peculiar and contradictory features of the man), the police were able to recognize him among the many suspects always under their eye.  Arrested, he pleaded, just as Miss Strange had foretold, an alibi of a seemingly unimpeachable character; but neither it, nor the plausible explanation with which he endeavoured to account for a freshly healed scar amid the callouses of his right foot, could stand before Mrs. Amidon’s unequivocal testimony that he was the same man she had seen in Mrs. Doolittle’s upper room on the afternoon of her own happiness and of that poor woman’s murder.

The moment when, at his trial, the two faces again confronted each other across a space no wider than that which had separated them on the dread occasion in Seventeenth Street, is said to have been one of the most dramatic in the annals of that ancient court room.

END OF PROBLEM III

PROBLEM IV

THE GROTTO SPECTRE

Miss Strange was not often pensive—­at least not at large functions or when under the public eye.  But she certainly forgot herself at Mrs. Provost’s musicale and that, too, without apparent reason.  Had the music been of a high order one might have understood her abstraction; but it was of a decidedly mediocre quality, and Violet’s ear was much too fine and her musical sense too cultivated for her to be beguiled by anything less than the very best.

Nor had she the excuse of a dull companion.  Her escort for the evening was a man of unusual conversational powers; but she seemed to be almost oblivious of his presence; and when, through some passing courteous impulse, she did turn her ear his way, it was with just that tinge of preoccupation which betrays the divided mind.

Were her thoughts with some secret problem yet unsolved?  It would scarcely seem so from the gay remark with which she had left home.  She was speaking to her brother and her words were:  “I am going out to enjoy myself.  I’ve not a care in the world.  The slate is quite clean.”  Yet she had never seemed more out of tune with her surroundings nor shown a mood further removed from trivial entertainment.  What had happened to becloud her gaiety in the short time which had since elapsed?

We can answer in a sentence.

She had seen, among a group of young men in a distant doorway, one with a face so individual and of an expression so extraordinary that all interest in the people about her had stopped as a clock stops when the pendulum is held back.  She could see nothing else, think of nothing else.  Not that it was so very handsome—­though no other had ever approached it in its power over her imagination—­but because of its expression of haunting melancholy,—­a melancholy so settled and so evidently the result of long-continued sorrow that her interest had been reached and her heartstrings shaken as never before in her whole life.