The inspector interrupted him placidly. “Much obliged for the suggestion, Wrenn! We might not have thought of searching this dressing room, but, thanks to you, we certainly will now!” “Of course,” he said to Barrison later, “we’d have had to do it anyway, but I wanted to scare that old chap into thinking it was chiefly his doing!” Wrenn gasped. “Oh, sir, oh, Mr. Dukane!” he implored. “Can’t he—lie in peace—just for to-night? I—I’d like to sit with him to-night, sir. Surely there’s no harm?” “Was he so very kind to you?” said the inspector sympathetically. Wrenn hesitated. “Mostly he was, sir,” he said at last, quite simply. And then he added in a queer, forlorn way: “I—I’ve been with him a long time, you know, sir.” The detectives, despite Wrenn’s protests, searched the room with methodical thoroughness. If there was one single thing, no bigger than a pin, which ought not, in the nature of things, to be in a dressing room of this kind, why, they were there to find it. “But why?” Dukane whispered to Barrison. “Not that there is the slightest objection—but what is it Lowry expects to find?” “He doesn’t,” replied Barrison. “He’s from Missouri; he wants to be shown. We always search the premises, you know——” “But it wasn’t here he was killed.” “No; but it was so near here that——Hello! They’ve got something!” He spoke in the tone of suppressed excitement that a fox hunter might have used. The plain-clothes man with the inspector had opened the trunk, and was staring into it with a puzzled face. At the same moment, Wrenn emitted a low moan, as though, after a struggle, he found himself obliged to give up at last. He staggered a trifle, and caught at the back of a chair to steady himself. “Well,” said the inspector, softly jocose. “Haven’t found the murderer in that trunk, have you, Sims?” “No, sir,” said the officer; but his voice was as puzzled as his eyes. “Only this.” He took something out of the trunk, and held it up in the unsparing glare of the dressing-room lights. It was assuredly an odd sort of article to be found in a man’s theater trunk. For it was a piece of filmy white stuff, with lace upon it, badly torn. “A sleeve,” said the inspector, with an obvious accent of astonishment. “A woman’s sleeve—let’s have a look at it.” He took it into his own hands. Clearly, it was the sleeve and part of the shoulder of a woman’s dress or blouse, trimmed with elaborate, but rather coarse and cheap lace. On the front, where it had evidently been ripped and torn away from the original garment, were finger prints, stamped in a brownish red. The inspector’s eyes strayed to the dressing table with its array of paints and powders. “Anything there that will correspond? Barrison, take a look, while Sims goes through the rest of the trunk.” Barrison returned with a jar. “It’s bolamine,” explained Dukane. “They use it for a dark make-up, to suggest tan or sunburn. Mortimer would naturally use it in an out-of-door part of this sort.”