"Stopped, is it?" he exclaimed with fine scorn. "I suppose Mr. Stuart told you that. Little he knows about it. They darsn't make a noise when he's about. But Argot's been terrible to her lately. Why, they made such a row that I had to go in there the other day and tell him if he didn't shut up I'd complain to Mr. Stuart. He glared at me, but they've been quieter since then. I guess she's a bad lot, and deserves what she gets, or else she wouldn't stand it." "I say, McGorry, you have seen nothing of a straw hat, have you?" "Lord! Hasn't Mr. Merritt been bothering me to death about that hat? No, I haven't found one." That was all I could get out of him. Not much, but still something. Returning to my office, I sat for a long time pondering over all I had seen and heard that morning, and the longer I thought the more likely did it seem that the corpse was that of some lover of Madame Argot's whom her husband had killed in an attack of jealous frenzy. I had never for a moment considered the possibility of the body being Greywood's, and Merritt thought the objections to its being that of the vanished Brown equally insurmountable. I was, therefore, forced to believe in the presence on that fatal Tuesday of yet another man. That he had not entered by the front door was certain; very well, then, he must have come in by the back one. Of course, that there should have been three people answering to the same description in the building at the time when the murder occurred seemed an incredible conglomeration of circumstances, but had not the detective himself suggested such a possibility? The most serious objections to the supposition that Argot had murdered the man were: first, the smallness of the wound, and, secondly, the distance of the place where the body was found from Stuart's apartment. The first difficulty I disposed of easily. Merritt had failed to convince me that a hat-pin had caused the fellow's death, and I thought it much more likely that the ornament found on the corpse was a simple bauble which had nothing to do with the tragedy. Now, a small stiletto--or, hold, I had it--a skewer! A skewer was a much more likely weapon than a hat-pin, anyhow, besides being just the sort of a thing a butler would find ready to his hand. The next objection was more difficult to meet, yet it did not seem impossible that, having killed the man, Argot should, with his wife's connivance, have secreted him in one of the closets which his master never opened, and then (having procured a duplicate key) have carried the body, in the wee small hours of the morning, up the three flights of stairs, and laid it in the empty apartment. Thoroughly satisfied with this theory, I went off to lunch. CHAPTER X THE MISSING HAT