“Really, Mr. Moore, I’m glad to see you here. It is quite natural for you to wish to learn by any means in your power what that picture concealed. I came back, because I suddenly remembered that I had forgotten to rehang it.” Involuntarily he glanced again at the wall overhead, which was as bare as his hand, save for the nail he had already examined. “It has concealed nothing,” he retorted. “You can see yourself that the wall is bare and that it rings as sound as any chimneypiece ever made.” Here he struck it heavily with his fist. “What did you imagine that you had found?” I smiled, shrugged my shoulders in tantalizing repetition of my former action upon a like occasion and then answered brusquely: “I did not come back to betray police secrets, but to restore this picture to its place. Or perhaps you prefer to have it down rather than up? It isn’t much of an ornament.” He scrutinized me darkly from over his shoulder, a wary gleam showing itself in his shrewd old eyes; and the idea crossed me that the moment might possess more significance than appeared. But I did not step backward, nor give evidence in any way that I had even thought of danger. I simply laid my hand on the picture and looked up at him for orders. He promptly signified that he wished it hung, adding as I hesitated these words: “The pictures in this house are supposed to stay on the walls where they belong. There is a traditional superstition against removing them.” I immediately lifted the print from the floor. No doubt he had me at a disadvantage, if evil was in his heart, and my position on the hearth was as dangerous as previous events had proved it to be. But it would not do to show the white feather at a moment when his fate, if not my own, hung in the balance; so motioning him to step down, I put foot on the chair and raised the picture aloft to hang it. As I did so, he moved over to the huge settle of his ancestors, and, crossing his arms over its back, surveyed me with a smile I rather imagined than saw. Suddenly, as I strained to put the cord over the nail he called out: “Look out! you’ll fall.” If he had intended to give me a start in payment for my previous rebuff he did not succeed; for my nerves had grown steady and my arm firm at the glimpse I had caught of the shelf below me. The fine brown powder I had scattered there had been displaced in five distinct spots, and not by my fingers. I had preferred to risk the loss of my balance, rather than rest my hand on the shelf, but he had taken no such precaution. The clue I so anxiously desired and for which I had so recklessly worked, was obtained. But when half an hour later I found an opportunity of measuring these marks and comparing them with those upstairs, I did not enjoy the full triumph I had promised myself. For the two impressions utterly failed to coincide, thus proving that whoever the person was who had been in this house with Mrs. Jeffrey on the evening she died, it was not her uncle David.