He felt that a judge would look with marked attention at such a face in the dock.

Judges, like lawyers, and all whose business it is to trip their kind into the gins of the law, scan faces as closely as evidence in the effort to read the stories written there.
But the disappearance of certain papers which had probably been abstracted from that room weighed more in the scale of suspicion against Sisily than her look of innocence.

She stood to gain most by the suppression or destruction of the proofs of her mother's earlier marriage.

But Mr.
Brimsdown could not see that this rather negative inference against the girl brought the actual solution of the mystery any nearer.

It did nothing to explain, for instance, the marks on the dead man's arm and his posthumous letter.