pon them. It gleamed,
too, upon the gold parts of the delicate work of dentistry that lay in
water in a shallow bowl of glass placed on a small, plain table by the
bedside. On this also stood a wrought-iron candlestick. Some clothing
lay untidily over one of the two rush-bottomed chairs. Various
objects on the top of a chest of drawers, which had been used as a
dressing-table, lay in such disorder as a hurried man might make. Trent
looked them over with a questing eye. He noted also that the occupant of
the room had neither washed nor shaved. With his finger he turned over
the dental plate in the bowl, and frowned again at its incomprehensible
presence.

The emptiness and disarray of the little room, flooded by the sunbeams,
were producing in Trent a sense of gruesomeness. His fancy called up
a picture of a haggard man dressing himself in careful silence by the
first light of dawn, glancing constantly at the inner door behind which
his wife slept, his eyes full of some terror.

Trent shivered, and to fix his mind again on actualities, opened two
tall cupboards in the wall on either side of the bed. They contained
clothing, a large choice of which had evidently been one of the very few
conditions of comfort for the man who had slept there.

In the matter of shoes, also, Manderson had allowed himself the
advantage of wealth. An extraordinary number of these, treed and
carefully kept, was ranged on two long low shelves against the wall. No
boots were among them. Trent, himself an amateur of good shoe-leather,
now turned to these, and glanced over the collection with an
appreciative eye. It was to be seen that Manderson had been inclined to
pride himself on a rather small and well-formed foot. The shoes were of
a distinctive shape, narrow and round-toed, beautifully made; all were
evidently from the same last.

Suddenly his eyes narrowed themselves over a pair of patent-leather
shoes on the upper shelf.

These were the shoes of which the inspector had already described the
position to him; the shoes worn by Manderson the night before his death.
They were a well-worn pair, he saw at once; he saw, too, that they had
been very recently polished. Something about the uppers of these shoes
had seized his attention. He bent lower and frowned over them, comparing
what he saw with the appearance of the neighbouring shoes. Then he took
them up and examined the line of junction of the uppers with the soles.

As he did this, Tre