opening into it, but it's practically useless, because the alley is so narrow one can't drive a vehicle through it. It's simply a right of way that can't legally be closed and runs from Croom Street on the right just along as far as Sturgiss Lane on the left. Not fifty people pass through it in a day's time. "But to come back to the short passage, Mr. Cleek. Observe, there are no windows at all on the side of our building, here: Number 2. There were, once upon a time, but we had them bricked up, as we use that side for a 'paint frame' with a movable bridge so that it can be used for the purpose of painting scenery and drop-curtains. But there _are_ windows in the side of the house marked 5; and directly opposite the point where I've put the arrow there is one which belongs to a room occupied by a Mrs. Sherman and her daughter--people who do 'bushel work' for wholesale costume houses. Now, it happens that at the exact time when the porter says he showed young Stan into the glass-room those two women were sitting at work by that window, and, the blinds not being drawn, could see smack into the place, and are willing to take their oath that there was no living soul in it." "How do they fix it as being, as you say,'the exact time,' Mr. Trent? If they couldn't see the porter come up to the glass-room with the boy, how can they be sure of that?" "Oh, that's easily explained: There's a church not a great way distant. It has a clock in the steeple which strikes the hours, halves, and quarters. Mrs. Sherman says that when it chimed half-past four she was not only looking into the glass-room, but was calling her daughter's attention to the fact that, whereas some few minutes previously she had seen Loti go out of the place, leaving a great pile of reference plates and scraps of material all over the floor, and he had never, to her positive knowledge, come back into it, there was the room looking as tidy as possible, and, in the middle of it, a table with a vase of pink roses upon it, which she certainly had not seen there when he left." "Hallo! Hallo!" interjected Cleek rather sharply. "Let's have that again, please!" and he sat listening intently while Trent repeated the statement; then, of a sudden, he gave his head an upward twitch, slapped his thigh, and, leaning back in his seat, added with a brief little laugh, "Well, of all the blithering idiots! And a simple little thing like that!" "Like what, Mr. Cleek?" queried Trent, in amazement. "You don't surely mean to say that you can make anything important out of a table and a vase of flowers? Because, I may tell you that Loti is mad on flowers, and always has a vase of them in the room somewhere." "Does he, indeed? Natural inclination of the artistic temperament, I dare say. But never mind, get on with the story. Mrs. Sherman fixes the hour when she noticed this as half-past four, you say? How, then, does the porter who showed the boy into the glass-room fix it, may I ask?"