As I walked along the Cromwell Road I could not but be put in mind of the last occasion when I had called at Esdaile's studio—that midday when I had found all locked up, Rooke departed, and had run him to earth in his old quarters in Jubilee Place. I have spoken of Mrs. Cunningham as an enigmatic sort of person, possibly as much an enigma to herself as to others, and inspiring more of compassion and kindness than of that other feeling that is supposed to be akin to these. Now I could not help wondering about her again. What had made her so suddenly break off with Monty? Had she had a reason, or none? I suppose there are these sensitive plants whose own interior moods and feelings outweigh all the logic of outward events, so that a flurry of nerves becomes a motive, and an intuition grounds for immediate action. Monty had spoken of her as having been on the verge of hysteria on that afternoon when her Jacobean wardrobe had been carried down into Esdaile's cellar. It was within a few days of that that she had definitely announced her intention of not marrying again. I repeat, that as I left the Cromwell Road and turned down by South Kensington Station, I could not help remembering all this and wondering. I was still wondering when I turned into Lennox Street.

It was a sunny afternoon, now well on towards summer, and as I walked up the path I noticed that Esdaile's grass already needed cutting. I remember thinking how jolly it must be at Santon that afternoon. Inside, as I opened the door, I found the floor strewn with the usual clutter of leaflets and circulars, coal-merchants' post-cards, announcements of dairies and window-cleaning firms. I turned them over and found nothing of importance among them. Then I passed to the annexe and the studio.

Before he had left, Esdaile had evidently set the place more or less in order, but, judging from the veil of dust that lay over everything, he had made no arrangements for having his house visited in his absence. I suppose Mollie's two maids had found fresh jobs by this time. The shuttering-up of the French window gave the alcove a vacant and dreary sort of look, which was not improved by a slight fall of soot that had come down the chimney and lay spread out over the hearth. In the studio the dark blue blinds were drawn, pictures stood with their faces turned to the walls, and those on the easels were wholly or partially covered with hanging valances of newspapers.

The sketches I had come to fetch formed a small separate parcel which I had no difficulty in finding. Nevertheless, to make sure they were the right ones, I sat down in an old double armchair with a frayed tapestry seat and unfastened the string that bound the brown paper. They were the required ones, and I replaced the paper and tied the string again. Then I continued to sit in the chair, not consciously thinking, with the bundle of sketches on my knees.

I dare say it was the indigo twilight in which I sat that brought back to me the last time I had seen those blinds drawn. You will remember that I had myself helped to draw them when the shuffling of feet on the roof had warned us that the police were about to carry the two men down into the garden. I gave a slight shiver, but as much at the rather drowsy air of the place as at the recollection itself. The studio would certainly be none the worse for half an hour's ventilation and sunlight. I was in no great hurry to leave. I rose from the tapestried chair, unfastened the blind-cords from the cleats, and began to pull back the blinds. The first one I drew back showed me that the broken roof-pane had been replaced by one of a different make of glass. I pulled back the remaining blinds, and then sought the long hooked pole that was used to draw down the upper portion of the wall-window.

It was as I crossed to the corner where this pole stood that my foot caught on the corner of a loose rug, tripping me slightly. As I did not fall I took no notice of this for the moment, but found the pole, pulled down the window, and let in the needed air. Only as I was replacing the pole did I notice the small round hole in the floor that the turning up of the rug had disclosed.

Now there are times when one does not so much think as leap to an instantaneous conclusion. Be it a right one or a wrong one, it possesses you like a flash for the infinitesimal portion of time it endures. In this merest flash of time my eyes had flown aloft. A hole in the floor, and another hole in the roof!... A new roof-pane might have been put in since, but I knew accurately in which portion of the old pane that shattered star with the small round hole in the middle of it had been. In that moment of time I saw the whole picture again—the star, that gray snowslide made by the bodies of the two men, the little wavering, creeping shadows of the broken mulberry branch. The hole in the middle of the star had been approximately over the hole in the floor that the moving of the rug had revealed.

"Then why," I cried excitedly to myself, "didn't he find the bullet? How did it come to be found in another house? If it went through the floor it ought to have been in his cellar—if he looked—if he isn't lying——"

And then, in another almost simultaneous flash, "Could there have been two bullets? There were seven left in the pistol—the magazine carries eight—but you can get a ninth in if you place it in the chamber itself——"

All this, I say, crossed my mind in one hundredth part of the time it has taken you to read it.

And then came the drop. I was all wrong. That hole in the floor wasn't a bullet-hole at all. You can get a clean round bullet-hole in glass, but not in a floorboard. Neither does any pistol make a hole with a neat little rim of yellow metal glinting inside it.

I assure you I was already on my hands and knees by the side of that hole. It was five-eighths of an inch in diameter, perfectly round, with, as I say, that lining of what I at first took to be brass. I inserted my little finger, but the lining was firmly fixed. It did not run through the thickness of the board, but occupied perhaps an eighth of an inch about a third of the way down it. And the removal of my finger, clearing away a little grime, revealed something else. I lay down with my eye close to the hole. The ring was not of brass, but of gold.

Breathlessly I rose and looked about for an instrument. A screwdriver on the window-ledge caught my eye. Yes, a screwdriver would do. I seized it and crouched on the floor again. I worked for perhaps a minute. At the end of that time the slender circle of metal was loose in the palm of my hand.

Even without the tiny initials engraved inside it I should have known it. Tightly as it had been wedged, not one of its three little emeralds had been wrenched out. It was the engagement-ring I had seen on Mrs. Cunningham's finger on the morning of our breakfast.