"Gentlemen," began Mr. Barnes, rising, "I am only an ordinary man, following a profession at which some are disposed to sneer, but which to me seems but the plain duty of one who is endowed with the peculiar qualities that are essential to the calling. Our host would make a magnificent detective, but I suppose he feels that he has a higher duty to perform. Begging you then to forgive my manner of addressing you, being by no means a speaker, I will tell you the little that I have done, prefacing my remarks by saying that without the valuable assistance of Mr. Mitchel I should have been powerless. "There was a curious button which I found in the room where the murder was committed, and which matched a set owned by Mr. Mitchel so closely, that it seemed to me to point to him as one who had a guilty knowledge. I spent much time following the clues that turned up in that connection, all of which however was not entirely misspent, for I discovered the true name of the dead woman to be Rose Montalbon, and that aided me greatly in my later work. At last, then, I abandoned the idea that Mr. Mitchel was guilty and frankly admitted this. He then told me the name of the jewelry firm from which the buttons had been ordered, and I went across the Atlantic. "The button which I had was imperfect. This was my starting-point. Through letters of introduction which Mr. Mitchel gave me, I succeeded in obtaining the assistance of the jewellers. They gave me the name of the man who had carved the cameos for them, but they knew nothing of the imperfect button. They had also lost track of the cameo-cutter. It took me over a month to trace that man, even with the aid of the Paris police. Finally I found him, and he told me that he had sold the button to a friend. This friend I found after some delay, and he admitted that he had once had the button, but that he had given it to a woman. More time was lost in discovering this woman, but when I did she too recognized the button and said that it had been stolen from her by another woman, whom she described as a Creole. Thus at last I got on the track of the Montalbon, for that was the name which she used in France. Under this name it was easier to follow her. I soon learned that she had a companion, by the name of Jean Molitaire. I then easily found that Molitaire had been in the employ of the Paris jewellers as shipping-clerk. It was he who had written the two descriptions of the jewels, one of which I found among the woman's effects, and the other in Mr. Mitchel's possession. This was a suspicious circumstance, but we know now how it was that the handwriting matched, a fact which had puzzled me greatly. It seems that Mr. Mitchel at one time had bought some valuable papers from the Montalbon woman, paying her with diamonds, and recommending her to his Paris jewellers to dispose of them."