"Oh, no! I don't give it up just yet. Do you know anything of your brother's private papers--as they were before his death?" "I never knew anything till after that. I have gone over them, but they are all very ordinary letters. Do you suspect a theft of papers?" Martin Hewitt, with his hands on his stick behind him, looked sharply at the other, and shook his head. "No," he said, "I can't quite say that." We bade Mr. Douglas Kingscote good-day, and walked towards the station. "Great nuisance, that setting to rights," Hewitt observed, on the way. "If the place had been left alone, the job might have been settled one way or another by this time. As it is, we shall have to run over to your old lodgings." "My old lodgings?" I repeated, amazed. "Why my old lodgings?" Hewitt turned to me with a chuckle and a wide smile. "Because we can't see the broken panel-work anywhere else," he said. "Let's see--Chelsea, isn't it?" "Yes, Chelsea. But why--you don't suppose the people who defaced the panels also murdered the man who painted them?" "Well," Hewitt replied, with another smile, "that would be carrying a practical joke rather far, wouldn't it? Even for the ordinary picture damager." "You mean you _don't_ think they did it, then? But what _do_ you mean?" "My dear fellow, I don't mean anything but what I say. Come now, this is rather an interesting case despite appearances, and it _has_ interested me: so much, in fact, that I really think I forgot to offer Mr. Douglas Kingscote my condolence on his bereavement. You see a problem is a problem, whether of theft, assassination, intrigue, or anything else, and I only think of it as one. The work very often makes me forget merely human sympathies. Now, you have often been good enough to express a very flattering interest in my work, and you shall have an opportunity of exercising your own common sense in the way I am always having to exercise mine. You shall see all my evidence (if I'm lucky enough to get any) as I collect it, and you shall make your own inferences. That will be a little exercise for you; the sort of exercise I should give a pupil if I had one. But I will give you what information I have, and you shall start fairly from this moment. You know the inquest evidence, such as it was, and you saw everything I did in Ivy Cottage?" "Yes; I think so. But I'm not much the wiser." "Very well. Now I will tell you. What does the whole case look like? How would you class the crime?" "I suppose as the police do. An ordinary case of murder with the object of robbery."