“I failed to think clear through to the edge,” the old gentleman confessed mournfully. “I fell before the irresistible presumption which imposed on every one else; the presumption that a man wandering about the house at night in bath-slippers and pajamas must be one of the guests. And that despite the clear clue we had to the contrary, in the failure of Punch’s review of all the pajamas in the house that had been slept in, to account for the pair with a nail tear in the leg.” This time it was Raglan’s coffee cup that halted sharply on the way to his lips. “Punch!” he murmured, and turned another thoughtful look on the little boy. But he was too hungry to be diverted more than momentarily from his breakfast, and Mr. Smith let him alone until he’d finished it. Then he offered him a cigar, and said, “I’d like to begin at the beginning. You came to the house ostensibly to put up window shades.” “Ostensibly!” Raglan put in. “I worked here for two days; I must have put up hundreds of them, all over the house--practically all over the house. I couldn’t get into the old lady’s room. There was no work of any sort being done there. But the rest of the house I came to know like the palm of my hand. “Wednesday afternoon when the old woman went around in her wheel chair, attended by her grandson, assigning rooms to the people who were coming, I was working up on this floor and I learned the names of every one who was coming and where every one was to sleep, which helped a lot. “And a little later that afternoon,” Mr. Smith observed, “when it was time for the workmen to quit, instead of leaving the house you moved into the room you’d selected for yourself and made yourself at home.--You know, I wonder a little at your choice of a hiding-place, the top floor of the house with only one flight of stairs leading to it and only one door out of the place, once you’d got in.” Raglan laughed--not a very nice sort of laugh, either. “I thought of all that,” he said. “But there were compensating advantages. I found them the first time I went in there. You can hear everything that’s said in both sitting rooms, the old lady’s and her daughter’s--by some trick of construction that I didn’t figure out.” “I know about that,” Punch volunteered. “The light comes up too. I asked grandmother why it was once, and she said grandfather had had the tops left off the window casings so that the long windows would slide all the way up.” “I no longer wonder at your choice of it as a hiding-place,” Mr. Smith remarked dryly. He took the staggering revelation, though, a good deal more calmly than I did. Heavens, how much did the man know! What was there that he didn’t know! I began to understand the basis for the fellow’s extraordinary complacency in confessing the details of his crime before three witnesses. Mr. Smith did nothing to disturb it. “When was it you stole the imitation necklace from Mrs. Corbin’s safe?” he asked. “Wednesday night?”