Page:The Master of Mysteries (1912).djvu/384

 a task as the other, and you ought to be able to manage it, if any one can."

"Oh, you can't make a person fall in love so easily as that!" said Valeska, turning away.

"I think you could make any one fall in love," he answered, gazing at her.

For a while there was silence between them. Then with apparent effort, he took up the subject they had left.

"The evidence is pretty equally balanced between the two," he said. "The son curls in his thumb in his sleep; but many do that. The same with the long second toe. Both have blue eyes; so that's no test. The girl affects him mentally, or spiritually; but that's merely sentimental evidence. Her sinistrality, of course, amounts to nothing, nor does the faint resemblance he remarked to himself. We have to have some positive physical abnormality in order to appear to prove heredity. Mere probability doesn't count."

"How about finger prints?" Valeska asked.

"We know little of that. We have no records of hereditary transmission in that direction. It's too bad."

"What was the ophthalmoscope test for? And why all that patter of moles and birthmarks?"

"A mere shot in the air! Do you know what I brought down, though? The colonel has an optic disk—that's where the optic nerve comes into the retina—of a most peculiar shape, like an angel's wings. I just stumbled on it, in the hope of finding something peculiar that wouldn't appear to any observer. Also, he has a curious red birthmark of almost the same shape on his left shoulder. I saw it when I was pretending to diagram the moles. Now what we have to do is to