The shattered porcelain vase had, in light of this discovery, taken on a real importance within Wiggly's mind. Hastily he began crawling on hands and knees about the room, retrieving every piece of it that he could find. When he had got together all of it he could find, he placed all the pieces on the table, with the tallow in a separate pile and, drawing up a chair, sat down and began to study it. Still no inspirational solution flashed through his mind; he began at nowhere and ended at the same place. Times without number he handled the pieces, absently sorting and resorting them, and at last, with a hopeless sigh of defeat, he realized that an explanation was beyond his powers of either deduction or imagination; he was simply beating his head against a stone wall. "Its no use!" he muttered under his breath. "Possibly I'm wrong after all! Possibly----" Outside the closed door in the hall he heard voices. Bates had come upstairs to call Joan Sheridan and her mother to attend the proceedings down in the library. Wiggly wondered if they would ask him to testify; probably not. Doctor Bushnell and the assistant district attorney would not want him upsetting things and confusing the accepted explanation by flinging his unproven theories at the jury. For a moment or so the newspaper man debated. "I know I've no authority to do it, and I will probably get thrown out on my ear, if I'm caught at it; but I've got a notion to have one more try." Leaving the piece of broken vase and the lumps of tallow on the table where he had been studying them with so little result, he turned toward the door, slipping quietly into the hall. The sound of voices came up the open stairway; Doctor Bushnell, in his capacity as deputy coroner, was swearing in the jury. Wiggly made for the wing of the house where he knew Joan Sheridan's room to be. He had never rid himself of the notion that she knew something about the murder that she would never tell unless it was forced from her unwilling lips; and the only force to which she would respond would be evidence. Her room was unlocked. He let himself in with the unconscious stealthiness that overtakes a man who finds himself entering unbidden places. Closing the door gently behind him, the reporter straightway went about the business in hand, which was to determine whether or not the room might not reveal something that would incriminate Joan Sheridan. First, he went to the girl's dressing table; the top of it, except for some silver-backed toilet articles, was barren; but in the right-hand drawer he did find hairpins. Quickly he compared them with the one in his pocket; they were of the same size, color, and pattern. As alike as the proverbial two peas in a pod; yet that in itself was slim proof, for, as Joan herself had said, all hairpins are so much alike. He had to have more than that--a great deal more than that.