She awoke the next morning in a calmer and more decided frame of mind. She was confident that she had hit upon the truth, and was only anxious to have it confirmed. One thought made her pause; Humblethorne knew of John and suspected Philip; his view of the affair corresponded rather closely with her own—only he read it as murder and she did not. How were they to prove that it was not? The broken window, clever as it was, had not thrown Humblethorne off the track, but he had missed its true significance. If he once grasped that, it might be hard, perhaps impossible, to prove that there had been no intention in the death. But there might be some fresh fact still to be discovered to help that proof. Evelyn smiled a little: wearily at her many resolutions to have nothing more to do with investigation: the spirit of it had caught hold of her. There was one thing now she did not understand, the first thing which had really set her feet towards discovery, and that was the shape of the stain on the bottom of the cigarette box. Why had Philip—or perhaps John—moved it? For moved it had been, she felt sure. Had one of them kicked it as they ran to Sir John? Probably it would not help at all to know, but it annoyed her; it was the one thing still concealed from her. As soon as she had had breakfast, she got up, dressed, and went downstairs. No one was in the hall, but, recognizing what an enormity she had committed in lifting the sheet and fingering the cigarette box, she was specially careful to come down the further side of the stairs. The sheet which usually lay more to the right was now a little in the way of her passing: to steady herself more surely in stepping round she put her hand on the heavy wooden cornice which ran along the wall at approximately the same height as the balusters on the other side; and as she stepped round and rather dragged her hand, she ran a small splinter into her thumb. She had gone several steps along the hall towards the passage, when it suddenly struck her as odd that a polished cornice should have such a thing as a splinter. She walked back and carefully examined the cornice. Level with the third step, on the under side of the cornice she found that the wood had received a blow. The projection of the cornice above kept it in shadow and on the mahogany it was hardly noticeable unless the eye was actually looking for it, but direct examination revealed a dent about a third of an inch across and half an inch deep; the edges where the polish was crushed were fresh. “Something else I don’t understand,” she muttered to herself; “now what in the world did that?” She spent several minutes examining cornice and wall, both above and below, for some distance on either side of the dent, but found nothing, and finally decided that there was nothing more to find.