The various objects he took out, first examined, and afterwards handed them to me. There were several letters, none of any great importance, some chemical memoranda scribbled in pencil upon a piece of blank paper, a gold presentation watch and chain, fifteen pounds odd in money, and a few minor trifles, none of which threw any light upon the mysterious tragedy. My companion made another careful examination of the body. Then, rising to his feet, he walked slowly around the laboratory, in further search, it seemed to me, of anything that the assassin might have left behind. But by his countenance I saw that this eccentric man who dealt in secrets, as he had admitted to me, was much puzzled and perplexed. The enigma was complete. So complicated and extraordinary were the whole circumstances that any attempt to unravel them only led one at once into an absolute _cul-de-sac_. To whom had the dead man signalled in the Morse code by raising and lowering the blind? Someone, friend or enemy, had been waiting outside near Clarence Gate in Regent's Park in the expectation of a message. He received it from the Professor's own hands, those hands which before the dawn were cramped in the stiffness of death. CHAPTER FOUR. A SILENT MESSAGE. For a full hour we remained there in the presence of the dead. Before that huddled figure I stood a dozen times trying to form some feasible theory as to what had actually occurred within that room. The problem, however, was quite inexplicable. Who had killed Professor Greer? There, upon the end of the unfortunate man's watch-chain, were the two keys which he always carried, keys which held the secrets of his experiments away from the prying eyes of persons who were undesirable. Many of his discoveries had been worth to him thousands of pounds, and to public companies which exploited and worked them hundreds of thousands of pounds more. There, in that very room in which I stood, had the Greer process of hardening steel been perfected, a process now used in hardening the armour-plates of our newest Dreadnoughts. Yet the master brain which had thought out those various combinations, and by years of patience had perfected the result, was now before me, inactive and dead. I shuddered at sight of that disfigured face, hideous in its limp inertness and horrible to the gaze. But Kershaw Kirk, his eyes narrower and his face more aquiline, continued his minute investigation of every object in the room. I watched him with increasing interest, noticing the negative result of all his labours. "I shall return again to-morrow when it is light," at last he said; "artificial light is of little use to me in this matter. Perhaps you'll come with me again--eh?" "I'll try," I said, though, to be candid, I was not very keen upon a second visit to the presence of the disfigured body of the Professor. I could not see why Kirk was so anxious to avoid the police and to keep the affair out of the papers.