Adjoining Millefleur’s own room was the writing room from which the poisoned envelope had been taken to Miss Blaisdell.  Over the little secretary was the sign, “No woman need be plain who will visit the Novella,” evidently the motto of the place.  The hair-dressing room was next to the little writing-room.  There were manicure rooms, steam-rooms, massage-rooms, rooms of all descriptions, all bearing mute testimony to the fundamental instinct, the feminine longing for personal beauty.

Though it was late when Kennedy had finished his investigation, he insisted on going directly to his laboratory.  There he pulled out from a corner a sort of little square table on which was fixed a powerful light such as might be used for a stereopticon.

“This is a simple little machine,” he explained, as be pasted together the torn bits of the letter which he had fished out of the scrap-basket, “which detectives use in studying forgeries.  I don’t know that it has a name, although it might be called a ‘rayograph.’  You see, all you have to do is to lay the thing you wish to study flat here, and the system of mirrors and lenses reflects it and enlarges it on a sheet.”

He had lowered a rolled-up sheet of white at the opposite end of the room, and there, in huge characters, stood forth plainly the writing of the note.

“This letter,” he resumed, studying the enlargement carefully, “is likely to prove crucial.  It’s very queer.  Collins says he didn’t write it, and if he did he surely is a wonder at disguising his hand.  I doubt if any one could disguise what the rayograph shows.  Now, for instance, this is very important.  Do you see how those strokes of the long letters are—­well, wobbly?  You’d never see that in the original, but when it is enlarged you see how plainly visible the tremors of the hand become?  Try as you may, you can’t conceal them.  The fact is that the writer of this note suffered from a form of heart disease.  Now let us look at the copy that Collins made at the Novella.”

He placed the copy on the table of the rayograph.  It was quite evident that the two had been written by entirely different persons.  “I thought he was telling the truth,” commented Craig, “by the surprised look on his face the moment I mentioned the note to Miss Blaisdell.  Now I know he was.  There is no such evidence of heart trouble in his writing as in the other.  Of course that’s all aside from what a study of the handwriting itself might disclose.  They are not similar at all.  But there is an important clue there.  Find the writer of that note who has heart trouble, and we either have the murderer or some one close to the murderer.”

I remembered the tremulousness of the little beauty-doctor, his third-rate artificial acting of fear for the reputation of the Novella, and I must confess I agreed with O’Connor and Collins that it looked black for him.  At one time I had suspected Collins himself, but now I could see perfectly why he had not concealed his anxiety to hush up his connection with the case, while at the same time his instinct as a lawyer, and I had almost added, lover, told him that justice must be done.  I saw at once how, accustomed as he was to weigh evidence, he had immediately seen the justification for O’Connor’s arrest of the Millefleurs.