to contemplate the coolness and ingenuity of the man. The
thing, I now began to see, was so safe and easy, provided that his
mimicry was good enough, and that his nerve held. Those two points
assured, only some wholly unlikely accident could unmask him.

To come back to my puzzling out of the matter as I sat in the dead man's
bedroom with the tell-tale shoes before me:--the reason for the entrance
by the window instead of by the front-door will already have occurred to
any one reading this. Entering by the door, the man would almost
certainly have been heard by the sharp-eared Martin in his pantry just
across the hall; he might have met him face to face.

Then there was the problem of the whisky. I had not attached much
importance to it; whisky will sometimes vanish in very queer ways in a
household of eight or nine persons; but it had seemed strange that it
should go in that way on that evening. Martin had been plainly quite
dumfounded by the fact. It seemed to me now that many a man--fresh, as
this man in all likelihood was, from a bloody business, from the
unclothing of a corpse, and with a desperate part still to play--would
turn to that decanter as to a friend. No doubt he had a drink before
sending for Martin; after making that trick with ease and success, he
probably drank more.

But he had known when to stop. The worst part of the enterprise was
before him, the business--clearly of such vital importance to him, for
whatever reason--of shutting himself in Manderson's room and preparing a
mass of convincing evidence of its having been occupied by Manderson;
and this with the risk--very slight, as no doubt he understood, but how
unnerving!--of the woman on the other side of the half-open door awaking
and somehow discovering him. True, if he kept out of her limited field
of vision from the bed, she could only see him by getting up and going
to the door. I found that to a person lying in her bed, which stood with
its head to the wall a little beyond the door, nothing was visible
through the doorway but one of the cupboards by Manderson's bed-head.
Moreover, since this man knew the ways of the household, he would think
it most likely that Mrs. Manderson was asleep. Another point with him, I
guessed, might have been the estrangement between the husband and wife,
which they had tried to cloak by keeping up, among other things, their
usual practice of sleeping in connected rooms, but which was well known
to all who ha