n a man
who put on all those clothes could forget to put in his teeth, you may
kick me from here to the nearest lunatic asylum, and hand me over as an
incipient dement.'

CHAPTER V: Poking About

There are moments in life, as one might think, when that which is within
us, busy about its secret affair, lets escape into consciousness some
hint of a fortunate thing ordained. Who does not know what it is to feel
at times a wave of unaccountable persuasion that it is about to go well
with him?--not the feverish confidence of men in danger of a blow from
fate, not the persistent illusion of the optimist, but an unsought
conviction, springing up like a bird from the heather, that success is
at hand in some great or fine thing. The general suddenly knows at dawn
that the day will bring him victory; the man on the green suddenly
knows that he will put down the long putt. As Trent mounted the
stairway outside the library door he seemed to rise into certainty
of achievement. A host of guesses and inferences swarmed apparently
unsorted through his mind; a few secret observations that he had made,
and which he felt must have significance, still stood unrelated to
any plausible theory of the crime; yet as he went up he seemed to know
indubitably that light was going to appear.

The bedrooms lay on either side of a broad carpeted passage, lighted by
a tall end window. It went the length of the house until it ran at right
angles into a narrower passage, out of which the servants' rooms opened.
Martin's room was the exception: it opened out of a small landing
half-way to the upper floor. As Trent passed it he glanced within. A
little square room, clean and commonplace. In going up the rest of the
stairway he stepped with elaborate precaution against noise, hugging
the wall closely and placing each foot with care; but a series of very
audible creaks marked his passage.

He knew that Manderson's room was the first on the right hand when the
bedroom floor was reached, and he went to it at once. He tried the latch
and the lock, which worked normally, and examined the wards of the key.
Then he turned to the room.

It was a small apartment, strangely bare. The plutocrat's toilet
appointments were of the simplest. All remained just as it had been
on the morning of the ghastly discovery in the grounds. The sheets and
blankets of the unmade bed lay tumbled over a narrow wooden bedstead,
and the sun shone brightly through the window u