g to tell you just
now how, in my dissatisfaction with a certain portion of my dream, I
refused to believe in the escape of my Mr. X by the way of the Curator's
office. The tapestry was lifted, the bow flung behind, but the man
stepped back instead of forward. An open flight along the gallery
commended itself more to him than the doubtful one previously arranged
for. If you will accept that for fact, which of course you will not, it
is easy to see how Correy might have been somewhere on that staircase
when the inspiration came to turn the appearance of flight into a show
of his own innocence, by a quick rush back into the further gallery
and a consequent loud-mouthed alarm. But I see that I am but getting
deeper and deeper in the quagmire of a bad theory badly stated. I am
forgetting----"

"Many things, Sweetwater. I will only mention a very simple one. The
man who shot the arrow wore gloves. You wouldn't attribute any such
extraordinary precaution as that to a fellow shooting an arrow across
the court on a dare?"

"You wouldn't expect it, sir. But in going about the museum that
afternoon, I came upon Correy's coat hanging on its peg. In one of its
pockets was a pair of kid gloves."

"You say the fellow is courting a rich girl," suggested Mr. Gryce. "Under
those circumstances some show of vanity is excusable. Certainly he would
not carry his folly so far as to put on gloves for the shooting match
with which you credit him, unless there was criminal intent back of his
folly--which, of course, would be as hard for you as for me to believe."

Sweetwater winced, but noting the kindly twinkle with which Mr. Gryce
softened the bitterness of this lesson, he brightened again and listened
with becoming patience as the old man went on to say:

"To discuss probabilities in connection with this other name seems futile
this morning. The ease with which one can twist the appearances of things
to fit a preconceived theory as exemplified by the effort you have just
made warns us to be chary of pushing one's idea too far without the
firmest of bases to support it. If you find a man's coat showing
somewhere on its lining evidences that there had once been sewed to it a
loop of the exact dimensions of the one I passed over to you last night,
I should consider it a much more telling clue to the personality of X
than a pair of gloves in the pocket of a man who in all probability
intends to finish up the day with a call on the girl he a