As Morris stepped into the light, Clancy's quick eyes took in at a glance his strong features and haggard aspect. This was a man not easily alarmed, Clancy thought. It would take a good deal to upset his balance, and, in search of enlightenment, his glance travelled swiftly all about the room. "Everything here just as you found it?" he asked, quickly. Morris nodded. "All but this," he said, in a heavy voice, motioning toward a table which stood near one of the windows. Clancy swiftly advanced and looked down intently at that which lay upon it. He touched it with his finger. "You found this scarf across the door-sill," he said, meditatively. And leaning closer he went on, "Stained.... Yes.... Blood?... Looks like it. Could hardly be anything else.... Not much of it.... And you found no----" "There's no one, dead or alive, in the apartment," Morris interrupted, hastily. He felt that he could not bear to hear the word which he saw forming itself on the detective's lips. "The officer went all through the place with me. It's empty, quite empty, though the janitor thought both Miss Blake and her sister were here. And," with a motion of his hand, "the place was as you see it." Again Clancy looked carefully around the room. It was unusually large and spacious, occupying the entire front of the old house. Simple, good old furniture, well placed, gave it an air of comfort and elegance, though there was not an unnecessary thing in the room. The three large windows facing the south were covered by thin ecru curtains held in place by a small rod at top and bottom, letting in the light but obscuring the view of the ugly, tall buildings across the way. Standing there, in that viewless room, Clancy had a swift sense of the isolation of so many thousands of lives in this dynamic and vital city. What could not happen in a secluded, quiet back-water like this? What lives and deaths, with the teeming city surrounding them on every side? The thought crossed his mind in a flash and was gone. He was not concerned now with profitless generalities. He had been summoned here to find out what had happened, and exactly what had happened, in this present case. There was not a great deal to go upon in this room; nothing especially out of the ordinary save the stained scarf upon the table, and the fact that the several drawers of a desk on the far side of the room had apparently been ransacked, some of them being still open, their contents partly scattered on the floor. A small table at the end of a long couch which stood at right angles to the fireplace had been overturned, and on the floor beside it lay a shattered vase of blue hawthorne. Apparently nothing else was out of place, and it was, perhaps, not unusual in this spring weather that there should be a quantity of ashes in the old-fashioned open grate. But ashes of any kind, perhaps from early association with the stories of the great Sherlock Holmes, always interested Peter Clancy.