But Posy didn’t smile, nor, indeed, did I. After a few more words she went off, and as she ran round the corner of the hedge I felt that doubtless she had dismissed the subject from her addle-pated head. For a few moments we sat, silently thinking over the story we had heard. I broke the silence finally by saying, “It’s too circumstantial not to be true.” “Yes,” Lora agreed, “it’s true, right enough, but I can’t quite understand.” “Nothing hard to understand,” I argued. “Alma has a more uncontrollable temper than I had any idea of. This doesn’t make me think she went so far as to kill her uncle in one of her angry fits but I will say that the matter must be looked into.” “Kee will look into it,” Lora said, with one of her gentle smiles. Kee’s wife was a good sort, and she always tried to make things easy and pleasant for me. I knew, though, that she was thinking over this thing, and I dreaded to learn whither her thoughts led her. For I distinctly remembered Mrs. Dallas saying that Sampson Tracy had wanted to tell her something about Alma, something unpleasant, she had implied. What could it have been but this, that the girl had, at times, an ungovernable temper? For I was determined I would not believe that the trouble lay deeper than that. That the sweet girl I adored had a flaw in her brain or a physical disorder that meant impaired intellect in any way! We ignored the subject by common consent, Lora, no doubt feeling that since it must be discussed with Kee, there was small use mulling it over beforehand. And then, Kee returned. He was full of some news of his own, so we listened to him first. “It’s about that sound Ames heard,” he told us. “You know he said, after several false starts, that it was like a stick drawn along a wall. “Well, it occurred to me that, if it was anything at all, it might be the murderer trailing along, with his hammer and nail in his hand, and if the hall was dark, feeling along the walls and doors to guide him.” “Rather far-fetched.” I smiled. “Well, the only way to see about it was to look on the door of Ames’s room and there, sure enough, was a long scratch, as if a nail or something had been dragged along it. A distinct scratch, but only across the door—at least, I could find no other such mark. So, me for the Coroner’s office to look over the exhibits. And, if you please, with a powerful lens, I discovered some minute particles of dark varnish in under the head of that nail that played the principal part in our death drama.” “Seems incredible,” I murmured, and indeed it did. “Yes, but true,” Kee averred. “And the brown varnish corresponds exactly to the door of Ames’s room, all the doors in that wing, in fact.” “Well, after all, what does it prove?” I asked, wearily, wondering what new horror was to be divulged.