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 The first one I drew back showed me that the broken roof-pane had been replaced by one of a different make of glass.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.