maid opened the door and swiftly
disappeared.

Trent, left alone in the little bedroom, relieved his mind with two
forcible descriptive terms in Celestine's language, and turned to his
problem. He took the pair of shoes which he had already examined, and
placed them on one of the two chairs in the room, then seated himself
on the other opposite to this. With his hands in his pockets he sat
with eyes fixed upon those two dumb witnesses. Now and then he whistled,
almost inaudibly, a few bars. It was very still in the room. A subdued
twittering came from the trees through the open window. From time to
time a breeze rustled in the leaves of the thick creeper about the sill.
But the man in the room, his face grown hard and sombre now with his
thoughts, never moved.

So he sat for the space of half an hour. Then he rose quickly to his
feet. He replaced the shoes on their shelf with care, and stepped out
upon the landing.

Two bedroom doors faced him on the other side of the passage. He opened
that which was immediately opposite, and entered a bedroom by no means
austerely tidy. Some sticks and fishing-rods stood confusedly in one
corner, a pile of books in another. The housemaid's hand had failed to
give a look of order to the jumble of heterogeneous objects left on the
dressing-table and on the mantelshelf--pipes, penknives, pencils, keys,
golf-balls, old letters, photographs, small boxes, tins, and bottles.
Two fine etchings and some water-colour sketches hung on the walls;
leaning against the end of the wardrobe, unhung, were a few framed
engravings. A row of shoes and boots was ranged beneath the window.
Trent crossed the room and studied them intently; then he measured some
of them with his tape, whistling very softly. This done, he sat on the
side of the bed, and his eyes roamed gloomily about the room.

The photographs on the mantelshelf attracted him presently. He rose and
examined one representing Marlowe and Manderson on horseback. Two others
were views of famous peaks in the Alps. There was a faded print of three
youths--one of them unmistakably his acquaintance of the haggard blue
eyes--clothed in tatterdemalion soldier's gear of the sixteenth century.
Another was a portrait of a majestic old lady, slightly resembling
Marlowe. Trent, mechanically taking a cigarette from an open box on the
mantel-shelf, lit it and stared at the photographs. Next he turned his
attention to a flat leathern case that lay by the ci