examined the spot minutely and
identified it as a mass of minute crystals, Thorndyke asked:

"What do you make of those creases? You see there is one on each leg."

"It looks as if the trousers had been turned up. But if they have been
they must have been turned up about seven inches. Poor Jeffrey couldn't
have had much regard for appearances, for they would have been right
above his socks. But perhaps the creases were made in undressing the
body."

"That is possible," said Thorndyke: "though I don't quite see how it
would have happened. I notice that his pockets seem to have been
emptied--no, wait; here is something in the waistcoat pocket."

He drew out a shabby, pigskin card-case and a stump of lead pencil, at
which latter he looked with what seemed to me much more interest than
was deserved by so commonplace an object.

"The cards, you observe," said he, "are printed from type, not from a
plate. I would note that fact. And tell me what you make of that."

He handed me the pencil, which I examined with concentrated attention,
helping myself even with the lamp and my pocket lens. But even with
these aids I failed to discover anything unusual in its appearance.
Thorndyke watched me with a mischievous smile, and, when I had finished,
inquired:

"Well; what is it?"

"Confound you!" I exclaimed. "It's a pencil. Any fool can see that, and
this particular fool can't see any more. It's a wretched stump of a
pencil, villainously cut to an abominably bad point. It is coloured dark
red on the outside and was stamped with some name that began with
C--O--Co-operative Stores, perhaps."

"Now, my dear Jervis," Thorndyke protested, "don't begin by confusing
speculation with fact. The letters which remain are C--O. Note that fact
and find out what pencils there are which have inscriptions beginning
with those letters. I am not going to help you, because you can easily
do this for yourself. And it will be good discipline even if the fact
turns out to mean nothing."

At this moment he stepped back suddenly, and, looking down at the floor,
said:

"Give me the lamp, Jervis, I've trodden on something that felt like
glass."

I brought the lamp to the place where he had been standing, close by
the bed, and we both knelt on the floor, throwing the light of the lamp
on the bare and dusty boards. Under the bed, just within reach of the
foot of a person standing close by, was a little patch of fragments of
glass. Thorndyke prod