"Have you heard of the Three Bridges Tragedy?" "The Three Bridges Tragedy? Yes." "That is the portrait of the victim." "The victim? So! She is dead. She was done to death. I knew it." "The man who has been found guilty of the crime is now lying in gaol under sentence of death." "They shan't hang him?" "It looks uncommonly as if they would." "I say they shan't. Not if I have to tear down the prison walls with my hands and nails to get at him. Do you think I've come all these thousands of miles to let them strangers pay the man that killed my girl? You bet I've not!" Mr. Haines glanced at the detective as if he defied his contradiction. The detective looked at him, in return, as if he doubted what to make of him. While the two men were thus, as it were, taking each other's measure, Miss Hetty Johnson advanced to the table on which Mr. Haines had, perhaps unconsciously, replaced the photographs. She picked them up. "Is this the poor girl who was murdered?" She glanced at them. As she did so she uttered a startled exclamation, "Why, it--it's Milly!" She turned to Mr. Holman all in a tremor of excitement. "Uncle, this is Milly!" Her uncle turned to her with what almost amounted to a savage start. "Who do you say it is? You don't mean to say that you know the original? Hanged if I don't believe everybody does except me. And here, all this time, we've been hunting the whole world to find out." Miss Johnson was not at all affected by her uncle's display of temper. She repeated her previous assertion, and that with more emphasis than before. "This is Milly Carroll who was with me at the theatre. I am sure of it. Aunt, you've heard me talk of Milly Carroll?" "Often," said her aunt. "Now, Hetty, don't you let your fancy run away with you. It may be like her, and yet it mayn't be her. Remember the mischief you might do. You think before you speak." "My dear aunt, there is not the slightest necessity for you to talk to me like that. I am sure that this is Milly Carroll. Heaps of girls at the theatre will tell you so if you ask them. It doesn't do her justice, and she looks as if she were dead, but it's her." She dropped her hand to her side, as if a startling reflection had all at once occurred to her. "I wonder if that explains it?" "Explains what?" "Her silence. I wondered why she had never replied to my last letter. All the time, perhaps, she was dead. And I was telling every one how unkind she was. To think of it!" "Do you know where she lived?" "When I last heard from her she was living at Brighton." "Brighton? Then he did do it. What an artistic liar that man must be!" "She left the stage for good. She was going to be married." "Going to be married, was she? Then it's her. What was her future husband's name?" "I never heard his name. We always took him for some big swell, she kept his name so close. She used to call him Reggie." "Reggie? Oh! Not Tommy?" "No, Reggie. I knew him very well by sight."