It was only Davenant’s part of the house that interested him—the bathroom, a bedroom, a small dining-room, and a study. They all bore the marks of recent inhabitation; but was this anything to go by? Davenant, in any case, would not be expected back for a week, and Sullivan did not strike Gordon as the kind of man who would be inclined to tidy up on Monday when Friday would do just as well. The bed, indeed, was made; but the grate in the study had not been cleared of cigarette-ends; the dining-room table was bare, but Monday’s paper was still lying across a chair, as if thrown down at random. On the whole the evidence pointed to Monday as the day of departure; Monday, not Tuesday, appeared on a tear-off calendar; a letter which had arrived on Monday evening was still waiting in the hall; and there were no clothes left in the dirty-clothes basket. Such an authority did Gordon feel himself to be on the subject of washing since his experiences at Binver that he investigated equally the clothes which had come back from the wash, and the list which accompanied them. And here was a curious phenomenon; the list referred to two collars, two handkerchiefs, and a pair of socks as having been disgorged by the Binver authorities, but none of these seemed to have crystallized in real life. “Binver is doing itself proud,” murmured Gordon to himself, “or could it possibly be——” He went and looked in the bathroom again: there was the sponge all right, which seemed to insist that Davenant kept a duplicate series of what the shops call toilet accessories; but where was the razor, the shaving soap, the tooth-brush? It seemed, after all, as if Davenant had packed for the week instead of leaving a duplicate week-end set behind him. But—Good Lord! This was still more curious. There was no soap in the bathroom, although there were traces of its presence still discernible. Surely no one packing after a week-end in the country took the soap with him? The face-towel, too, was gone; yet the face-towel was distinctly mentioned in the washing-list. No, decidedly there was something wrong about Davenant’s exit.