Wiggly was not discouraged; beginning at the side of the room, he began to walk slowly, bent nearly double, his eyes searching, searching, while Tish watched him in a half-amused, half-contemptuous silence. Again the reporter came upon the shattered pieces of the broken vase which lay on the rug near the little mahogany table, but he had already rejected these fragments as things of no importance; proof, if anything, that some one, probably the murderer, had struck against the table, crashing the vase to the floor. Perhaps it was to his discredit as an investigator that it did not occur to him as strange that the vase should have been broken into as many pieces. Near the table, however, he did find something that he had overlooked until now; it was a bit of whitish substance which, as he picked it up from where it had been crushed flat into the rug, was moderately soft between his fingers. He frowned over it, puzzled. "Tallow!" he exclaimed. "The sort of tallow they make candles of." "Huh!" grunted Tish. "People seldom use tallow candles these days, except for those decorative candlesticks." His gaze roved swiftly about the room. "No candlestick in this room, either. This piece is too chunky to be candle drip; besides, why should any one have been walking around with a lighted candle last night? If the lights had been out of commission, some one would surely have mentioned it. Wouldn't you consider this just a little queer, Tish?" "If you're asking me to speak my mind, I'd be more apt to say that you're a little queer, always jumping at little things that don't amount to anything. What if it is a piece of tallow? That don't prove anything--any more than a hairpin does." Speculatively Wiggly turned the find over in his hand; it was grained with black specks. He looked to the floor again and, some three or four feet away, saw another bit of it. "No children in the house," he mused. "Children might explain it; when I was a kid I used to take a candle and mold it into odd sorts of shapes--a juvenile attempt at sculpture--human heads, animals, and the like. Yes, Tish, this is queer--darned queer!" Completely baffled in his effort to account for the presence of the tallow, he put it into his pocket along with the black hairpin. "Something else to think about, anyhow," he told himself and continued his literally inch-by-inch survey of the room. It was at the far end of the chamber that, almost completely hidden in the thick nap of the rug, he found another piece of the broken vase, this one little more than a sliver, and still another bit of the tallow. "Tish!" he fairly shouted. "Come here! Here's a little mystery all in itself." "What now?" Wiggly exhibited the fragment of porcelain and pointed dramatically to the spot on the rug where he had discovered it.