Bunson, the butler, deposed that before leaving the house with his fellow-servants for the theatre, he had locked the three drawing-room windows. When the police examined the room afterwards, the middle one of these had been found unfastened and slightly open. It assuredly would not have been difficult for the assassin to have come along the iron balcony to that window and there have tapped for admittance. But Bunson swore positively that unless the deceased had opened the window, the man could not have entered. It was this witness who had found the body, and he stated that he had not touched it until it was seen by Inspector Harkness and his underlings. It was at this point, and in answer to the question of a juryman, that the inspector admitted the absence of the weapon with which the deceased had been killed. No stiletto had been found, either in the drawing-room or in any part of the house, so it was presumed that the criminal must have taken it away with him. "I wonder that he did not place the stiletto in the hand of the dead woman, so that it might be supposed she had committed suicide," said a juryman. "Probably he did not think that it would be proved that the deceased had taken the stiletto from her sister's room when the stage costumes were being displayed," suggested another juryman. "We have not yet learned if the murder was committed with that weapon," was the coroner's remark. "Call George Colpster." Then came the turn of the Squire to be examined, but he could tell nothing likely to aid in the discovery of the criminal. Mrs. Pentreddle, he declared, had been his housekeeper for over twenty years, and had rarely gone away on a holiday. She had asked him for a fortnight's leave, so that she might pay a visit to Mrs. Sellars in London, and this he had readily granted. She had never told him the reason why she wished to go to London, but he presumed at the time that she intended to see her sailor son during her stay. When this fact, or, rather, this suggested fact, became known, the coroner recalled Mrs. Sellars, and learned again what he might have known he had learned before, had he referred to his notes, that Harry Pentreddle had never been near the house. When Mrs. Sellars stepped away again from the position allotted to the witnesses, Squire Colpster finished his evidence by swearing solemnly that his housekeeper had never hinted that she was in danger of her life. "Yet she must have thought so," observed a juryman, "else she would not have taken the stiletto." "We have not yet proved that the murder was committed with that weapon," snapped the coroner once more.