orace," he said, "if you have anything but toothpicks for
matches, we will look for the overcoat, and then we will go upstairs."

"Suppose he wakens and raises an alarm?"

"We'll be out of luck. That's all."

As we had anticipated, there was no overcoat in the library, and after
listening a moment at the kitchen door, we ascended a rear staircase to
the upper floor. I had, it will be remembered, fallen from a chair on
a table in the dressing room, and had left them thus overturned when I
charged the third floor. The room, however, was now in perfect order,
and when I held my candle to the ceiling, I perceived that the bullet
hole had again been repaired, and this time with such skill that I could
not even locate it.

"We are up against some one cleverer than we are, Sperry," I
acknowledged.

"And who has more to lose than we have to gain," he added cheerfully.
"Don't worry about that, Horace. You're a married man and I'm not. If a
woman wanted to hide some letters from her husband, and chose a
curtain for a receptacle, what room would hide them in. Not in his
dressing-room, eh?"

He took the candle and led the way to Elinor Wells's bedroom. Here,
however, the draperies were down, and we would have been at a loss, had
I not remembered my wife's custom of folding draperies when we close the
house, and placing them under the dusting sheets which cover the various
beds.

Our inspection of the curtains was hurried, and broken by various
excursions on my part to listen for the watchman. But he remained quiet
below, and finally we found what we were looking for. In the lining of
one of the curtains, near the bottom, a long, ragged cut had been made.

"Cut in a hurry, with curved scissors," was Sperry's comment. "Probably
manicure scissors."

The result was a sort of pocket in the curtain, concealed on the chintz
side, which was the side which would hang toward the room.

"Probably," he said, "the curtain would have been better. It would have
stayed anyhow. Whereas the bag--" He was flushed with triumph. "How in
the world would Hawkins know that?" he demanded. "You can talk all you
like. She's told us things that no one ever told her."

Before examining the floor in the hall I went downstairs and listened
outside the kitchen door. The watchman was stirring inside the room, and
groaning occasionally. Sperry, however, when I told him, remained cool
and in his exultant mood, and I saw that he meant to vindicate Miss