But the criminal remained in all his blackness, and her heart knew no pity there: she stooped and, fighting down a sense of nausea, took up the pair of evening shoes on which Humblethorne had pounced with avidity on his entrance the day before. Their smooth, undarkened soles came as a sudden shock to her; she had been so certain that she would have no need to look further. Then the same thought occurred to her as previously to Humblethorne—these were worn and left conspicuously about just because he had a second pair. She understood completely now what Humblethorne had meant. But she had something which would be decisive even without the discovery of that pair: with a trembling hand she took up her paper pattern and laid it on the left shoe of the two in her hand. It was several sizes too large! To say that she was taken aback would be hopelessly to understate the turmoil in her brain; she stared at the misfit, so incomprehensible, so utterly unexpected, as if she were seeing a ghost. Her breath went and came; her colour left her; it was against all reason, past all understanding. It could not be true. Then after a few moments of absolute blank disbelief, when it was obvious that unless she had taken leave of her senses she could not by any alteration of the placing of the pattern make it coincide with the shoe, her mind began to work feverishly again. She could not be entirely wrong, it was the shoe which was wrong, it must be. She knew that at any rate this was not the shoe which had left the stain; perhaps the subtle mind of the man she was tracking had foreseen this, and had deliberately left these small shoes about to be found by any one who came so far along the path of his crime. She snatched up one after the other the left feet of the three other pairs of shoes and boots in the room: the result was identically the same. “I’m going out of my mind,” she thought; “there’s something wrong somewhere!” It could not now be the shoe; it was absurd to suppose that all the footgear was a blind. It must be the pattern, she decided; she was agitated when she cut it out and had made it too big. Yes, that must be it: she seized the left evening shoe again, hurried out of the room down the passage until she stood half-breathless once more before the little dancing girl. She waited a moment to steady herself and then bent down and, taking the utmost pains to ensure accuracy, placed the shoe over the stain. She could no longer doubt her eyes: the stain was too big.