"Of course not," agreed the detective. "To my mind appearances are entirely against this fellow. Yet, we have one fact to bear in mind, namely, that being sent to town twice he was afforded every opportunity for escape." "He was artful," I remarked. "He knew that his safest plan was to remain and face it. If, as seems very probable, the crime was planned, it was certainly carried out at a most propitious moment." "It certainly was," observed my friend, carefully scrutinising the knife, which Thorpe had brought to him. "This," he said, "must be examined microscopically. You can do that, Boyd. It will be easy to see if there are any traces of blood upon it. To all appearances it has been recently cleaned and oiled." "Short admits cleaning it, but he says he did so three days ago," I exclaimed. He gave vent to another low grunt, from which I knew that the explanation was unsatisfactory, and replaced the knife in its faded velvet sheath. Save for the man upon whom suspicion had thus fallen, the servants had all gone to the house where their mistress was lodged, after being cautioned by the police to say nothing of the matter, and to keep their mouths closed to all the reporters who would no doubt very soon be swarming into the district eager for every scrap of information. Their evidence would be required at the inquest, and the police forbade them, until then, to make any comment, or to give any explanation of the mysterious affair. The tongues of domestics wag quickly and wildly in such cases, and have many times been the means of defeating the ends of justice by giving away important clues to the Press. Ambler Jevons, however, was a practised hand at mysteries. He sat down in the library, and with his crabbed handwriting covered two sheets of paper with notes upon the case. I watched as his pencil went swiftly to work, and when he had finished I saw him underline certain words he had written. "Thorpe appears to suspect that fellow Short," he remarked, when I met him again in the library a quarter of an hour later. "I've just been chatting with him, and to me his demeanour is not that of a guilty man. He's actually been upstairs with the coroner's officer in the dead man's room. A murderer generally excuses himself from entering the presence of his victim." "Well," I exclaimed, after a pause, "you know the whole circumstances now. Can you see any clue which may throw light on the affair?" He slowly twisted his moustache again; then twisted his plain gold ring slowly round the little finger on the left hand--a habit of his when perplexed. "No, Ralph, old chap; can't say I do," he answered. "There's an unfathomable mystery somewhere, but in what direction I'm utterly at a loss to distinguish." "But do you think that the assassin is a member of the household? That seems to me our first point to clear up."