window to get a better view
of my operations, then commanded,

"Let me have that knife." He took it from my fingers, dug with its
blade, and suddenly from the inside I saw a tiny hole appear in the
frame of the sash beside the lock hasp. "Here we are!" He brought his
upper half back into the room and held up a wooden plug, painted--dipped
in paint--the exact color of the sash. It had concealed a hole; pierced
the wood from out to in.

"And she saw that in her trance," I murmured, gaping in amazement at the
plug.

I heard her catch her breath, and Worth scowled at me,

"Trance? What do you mean, Boyne? She doesn't go into a trance."

"That--that--whatever she does," I corrected rather helplessly.

"Never mind, Mr. Boyne," said the girl. "It isn't clairvoyance or
anything like that, however it looks."

"But I wouldn't have believed any human eyes could have found that
thing. I discovered it only by sense of touch--and that after you told
me to hunt for it. You saw it when I was showing you the latch, did
you?"

"Oh, I didn't see it." She shook her head. "I found it when I was
sitting up there on the roof."

"Guessed at it?"

"I never guess." Indignantly. "When I'd cleared my mind of everything
else--had concentrated on just the facts that bore on what I wanted to
know--how that man with the suitcase got out of the room and left it
locked behind him--I deduced the hole in the sash by elimination."

"By elimination?" I echoed. "Show me."

"Simple as two and two," she assented. "Out of the door? No; Mrs.
Griggsby; so out of the window. Down? No; you told why; he would be
seen; so, up. Ladder? No; too big for one man to handle or to hide; so a
rope."

"But the hole in the sash?"

"You showed me the only way to close that lock from the outside. There
was no hole in the glass, so there must be in the sash. It was not
visible--you had been all over it, and a man of your profession isn't a
totally untrained observer--so the hole was plugged. I hadn't seen the
plug, so it was concealed by paint--"

I was trying to work a toothpick through the plughole. She offered me a
wire hairpin, straightened out, and with it I pushed the hasp into place
from outside, saw the lever snap in to hold it fast. I had worked the
catch as Clayte had worked it--from outside.

"How did you know it was _this_ window?" I asked, forced to agree that
she had guessed right as to the sash lock. "There are two more here,
either of which-