I produced the photograph.  “What do you make of that?” I asked. “I think it an honest face, myself, I may tell you.”

She scrutinised it long and closely with a magnifier.  Then she put her head on one side and mused very deliberately.  “Madeline Shaw gave me her photograph the other day, and said to me, as she gave it, ’I do so like these modern portraits; they show one what might have been.’”

“You mean they are so much touched up!”

“Exactly.  That, as it stands, is a sweet, innocent face—­an honest girl’s face—­almost babyish in its transparency but . . . the innocence has all been put into it by the photographer.”

“You think so?”

“I know it.  Look here at those lines just visible on the cheek.  They disappear, nowhere, at impossible angles.  And the corners of that mouth.  They couldn’t go so, with that nose and those puckers.  The thing is not real.  It has been atrociously edited.  Part is nature’s; part, the photographer’s; part, even possibly paint and powder.”

“But the underlying face?”

“Is a minx’s.”

I handed her the letter.  “This next?” I asked, fixing my eyes on her as she looked.

She read it through.  For a minute or two she examined it.  “The letter is right enough,” she answered, after a second reading, “though its guileless simplicity is, perhaps, under the circumstances, just a leetle overdone; but the handwriting—­the handwriting is duplicity itself:  a cunning, serpentine hand, no openness or honesty in it.  Depend upon it, that girl is playing a double game.”

“You believe, then, there is character in handwriting?”

“Undoubtedly; when we know the character, we can see it in the writing.  The difficulty is, to see it and read it before we know it; and I have practised a little at that.  There is character in all we do, of course—­our walk, our cough, the very wave of our hands; the only secret is, not all of us have always skill to see it.  Here, however, I feel pretty sure.  The curls of the g’s and the tails of the y’s—­how full they are of wile, of low, underhand trickery!”

I looked at them as she pointed.  “That is true!” I exclaimed.  “I see it when you show it.  Lines meant for effect.  No straightness or directness in them!”

Hilda reflected a moment.  “Poor Daphne!” she murmured.  “I would do anything to help her. . . .  I’ll tell what might be a good plan.”  Her face brightened.  “My holiday comes next week.  I’ll run down to Scarborough—­it’s as nice a place for a holiday as any—­ and I’ll observe this young lady.  It can do no harm—­and good may come of it.”

“How kind of you!” I cried.  “But you are always all kindness.”

Hilda went to Scarborough, and came back again for a week before going on to Bruges, where she proposed to spend the greater part of her holidays.  She stopped a night or two in town to report progress, and, finding another nurse ill, promised to fill her place till a substitute was forthcoming.