“Well, you see,” said Carmichael, “I had to go and clear up your room before the housemaid came in. Housemaids don’t like chewing-gum on their boots.” And with this partial explanation Reeves had to be satisfied till they sat down to smoke a pipe after breakfast in a secluded corner of the lounge. “For Heaven’s sake let’s have an explanation,” he urged. “There’s a chewing-gum _motif_ running through life at present which is worrying me more than I can say.” “I don’t mind about that,” said Gordon; “what worries me is Carmichael being up and dressed at half-past seven.” “Well, if you prefer it, let us put it this way,” said Carmichael. “I had to get up early, Reeves, to unlock your room; otherwise the maid wouldn’t have been able to tidy it for you.” “To unlock it? When did you lock it, then?” “When I left it, to be sure, at twelve o’clock last night.” “What! Do you mean to say that Gordon and I sat there for a solid hour waiting for somebody to go into my room, when the door was locked all the time? Look here, Carmichael, if you’ve simply been pulling our legs——” “No, I have not been pulling your legs, if I apprehend rightly the meaning of that rather puzzling metaphor. You were waiting for somebody to _try_ to get into your room; if he had tried, he would have found two muscular young men tackling him from behind, and the possibility of getting through the door would have had a merely academic interest.” “But I thought you said we were to catch him red-handed? Pretty good fools we should have looked if we had found that it was some guest who’d mistaken his room, or somebody who was wanting to borrow a pipe-cleaner!” “I admit it. But then, you see, I had an intuition, almost amounting to a certainty, that the visitor who intruded upon your room does not come in through the door.” “Oh, he doesn’t? Then you mean that Gordon and I were merely sacrificed to your peculiar sense of humour—we weren’t really doing any good? My word, Carmichael——” “You are always too hasty in leaping to conclusions. You were doing a great deal of good by sitting up in the room opposite. You were convincing the mysterious gentleman that I expected him to come through the door. And it was that conviction which emboldened him to pay you a visit last night. I am sorry to have practised any deception on you two, but really it was the only means that occurred to me for inducing the gentleman behind the scenes to act as he did. And after all, I only made you sit up for an hour.” “An hour,” said Gordon, “cannot be properly measured by the movements of a clock, an inanimate thing which registers time but doesn’t _feel_ it. Many things lengthen time; but three things above all, darkness, silence, and not smoking. The watch we kept last night was a fair equivalent for three hours over a fire with a pipe.”