latter. Would you like to look through them? I have not had the
heart to open the bag since I came back."

As this was exactly what I wished, I said as much, and she led me into a
small room, against the wall of which stood a trunk with a
travelling-bag on top of it. Opening the latter, she spread the contents
out on the trunk.

"I know all these things," she sadly murmured, the tears welling in her
eyes.

"This?" I inquired, lifting up a bit of coiled wire with two or three
rings dangling from it.

"No; why, what is that?"

"It looks like a puzzle of some kind."

"Then it is of no consequence. My husband was forever amusing himself
over some such contrivance. All his friends knew how well he liked
these toys and frequently sent them to him. This one evidently reached
him from Philadelphia."

Meanwhile I was eyeing the bit of wire curiously. It was undoubtedly a
puzzle, but it had appendages to it that I did not understand.

"It is more than ordinarily complicated," I observed, moving the rings
up and down in a vain endeavour to work them off.

"The better he would like it," she said.

I kept working with the rings. Suddenly I gave a painful start. A little
prong in the handle of the toy had started out and pierced me.

"You had better not handle it," said I, and laid it down. But the next
moment I took it up again and put it in my pocket. The prick made by
this treacherous bit of mechanism was in or near the same place on my
thumb as the one I had noticed on the hand of the deceased Mr. Holmes.

There was a fire in the room, and before proceeding further I cauterised
that prick with the end of a red-hot poker. Then I made my adieux to
Mrs. Holmes and went immediately to a chemist friend of mine.

"Test the end of this bit of steel for me," said I. "I have reason to
believe it carries with it a deadly poison."

He took the toy, promising to subject it to every test possible and let
me know the result. Then I went home. I felt ill, or imagined I did,
which under the circumstances was almost as bad.

Next day, however, I was quite well, with the exception of a certain
inconvenience in my thumb. But not till the following week did I receive
the chemist's report. It overthrew my whole theory. He found nothing,
and returned me the bit of steel.

But I was not convinced.

"I will hunt up this John Graham," thought I, "and study him."

But this was not so easy a task as it may appear. As Mrs. Holmes
poss