in Manderson's
bedroom might have been many miles away on the road to Southampton.

I had, however, a pretty good idea already--as perhaps the reader of
these lines has by this time, if I have made myself clear--of how the
escape of the false Manderson before midnight had been contrived. But I
did not want what I was now about to do to be known. If I had chanced to
be discovered at work, there would have been no concealing the direction
of my suspicions. I resolved not to test them on this point until the
next day, during the opening proceedings at the inquest. This was to be
held, I knew, at the hotel, and I reckoned upon having White Gables to
myself so far as the principal inmates were concerned.

So in fact it happened. By the time the proceedings at the hotel had
begun, I was hard at work at White Gables. I had a camera with me. I
made search, on principles well known to and commonly practised by the
police, and often enough by myself, for certain indications. Without
describing my search, I may say at once that I found and was able to
photograph two fresh finger-prints, very large and distinct, on the
polished front of the right-hand top drawer of the chest of drawers in
Manderson's bedroom; five more (among a number of smaller and less
recent impressions made by other hands) on the glasses of the French
window in Mrs. Manderson's room, a window which always stood open at
night with a curtain before it; and three more upon the glass bowl in
which Manderson's dental plate had been found lying.

I took the bowl with me from White Gables. I took also a few articles
which I selected from Marlowe's bedroom, as bearing the most distinct of
the innumerable finger-prints which are always to be found upon
toilet-articles in daily use. I already had in my possession, made upon
leaves cut from my pocket diary, some excellent finger-prints of
Marlowe's, which he had made in my presence without knowing it. I had
shown him the leaves, asking if he recognized them; and the few seconds
during which he had held them in his fingers had sufficed to leave
impressions which I was afterward able to bring out.

By six o'clock in the evening, two hours after the jury had brought in
their verdict against a person or persons unknown, I had completed my
work, and was in a position to state that two of the five large prints
made on the window-glasses, and the three on the bowl, were made by the
left hand of Marlowe; that the remaining th