At this moment Thorndyke astonished me by an exhibition of what seemed--under the tragic circumstances--the most outrageous bad manners and bad taste. Rising from his chair with his eyes fixed on a print which hung on the wall above the red-covered table, he said: “That looks like one of Cameron’s etchings,” and forthwith stepped across the room to examine it, resting his hand, as he leaned forward, on the object covered by the cloth. “Mind where you are putting your hand, sir!” Fred Barnett called out, springing to his feet. Thorndyke looked down at his hand, and deliberately raising a corner of the cloth, looked under. “There is no harm done,” he remarked quietly, letting the cloth drop; and with another glance at the print, he went back to his chair. Once more a deep silence fell upon the room, and I had a vague feeling that the tension had increased. Mrs. Barnett was as white as a ghost and seemed to catch at her breath. Her husband watched her with a wild, angry expression and smoked furiously, while the superintendent--also conscious of something abnormal in the atmosphere of the room--looked furtively from the woman to the man and from him to Thorndyke. Yet again in the silence the shrill barking of the Pekinese dog broke out, and somehow that sound connected itself in my mind with the Persian cat that dozed on the knees of the immovable man by the fire. I looked at the cat and at the man, and even as I looked, I was startled by a most extraordinary apparition. Above the man’s shoulder, slowly rose a little round head like the head of a diminutive, greenish-brown man. Higher and higher the tiny monkey raised itself, resting on its little hands to peer at the strangers. Then, with sudden coyness, like a shy baby, it popped down out of sight. I was thunderstruck. The cat and the dog I had noted merely as a curious coincidence. But the monkey--and such an unusual monkey, too--put coincidences out of the question. I stared at the man in positive stupefaction. Somehow that man was connected with that unforgettable figure lying upon the couch miles away. But how? When that deed of horror was doing, he had been here in this very room. Yet, in some way, he had been concerned in it. And suddenly a suspicion dawned upon me that Thorndyke was waiting for the actual perpetrator to arrive. “It is a most ghastly affair,” Barnett repeated presently in a husky voice. Then, after a pause, he asked: “Is there any sort of evidence as to whether she killed herself or was killed by somebody else?” “I think that my friend, here, Detective-Superintendent Miller, has decided that she was murdered.” He looked at the bewildered superintendent, who replied with an inarticulate grunt. “And is there any clue as to who the--the murderer may be? You spoke of suspected persons just now.”