smooth surface it may touch.
That bowl was moved by somebody with a rather moist hand quite lately."
He sprinkled the powder again. "Here on the other side, you see, is the
thumb-mark--very good impressions all of them." He spoke without raising
his voice, but Mr. Cupples could perceive that he was ablaze with
excitement as he stared at the faint gray marks. "This one should be the
index finger. I need not tell a man of your knowledge of the world that
the pattern of it is a single-spiral whorl, with deltas symmetrically
disposed. This, the print of the second finger, is a simple loop, with a
staple core and fifteen counts. I know there are fifteen, because I have
just the same two prints on this negative, which I have examined in
detail. Look--!" he held one of the negatives up to the light of the
declining sun and demonstrated with a pencil point. "You can see they're
the same. You see the bifurcation of that ridge. There it is in the
other. You see that little scar near the center. There it is in the
other. There are a score of ridge-characteristics on which an expert
would swear in the witness-box that the marks on that bowl and the marks
I have photographed on this negative were made by the same hand."

"And where did you photograph them? What does it all mean?" asked Mr.
Cupples, wide-eyed.

"I found them on the inside of the left-hand leaf of the front-window in
Mrs. Manderson's bedroom. As I could not bring the window with me, I
photographed them, sticking a bit of black paper on the other side of
the glass for the purpose. The bowl comes from Manderson's room. It is
the bowl in which his false teeth were placed at night. I could bring
that away, so I did."

"But those cannot be Mabel's finger-marks."

"I should think not!" said Trent with decision. "They are twice the size
of any print Mrs. Manderson could make."

"Then they must be her husband's."

"Perhaps they are. Now shall we see if we can match them once more? I
believe we can." Whistling faintly, and very white in the face, Trent
opened another small squat bottle containing a dense black powder.
"Lamp-black," he explained. "Hold a bit of paper in your hand for a
second or two, and this little chap will show you the pattern of your
fingers." He carefully took up with a pair of tweezers one of the leaves
cut from his diary, and held it out for the other to examine. No marks
appeared on the leaf. He tilted some of the powder out upon one surface
of