pictured handle, its dull blade just caught a
grey glint from the dreary window behind, which showed the black trees
against the leaden level of the sea. Towards the opposite corner of
the room was rolled a gentleman's silk top hat, as if it had just been
knocked off his head; so much so, indeed, that one almost looked to see
it still rolling. And in the corner behind it, thrown like a sack of
potatoes, but corded like a railway trunk, lay Mr James Todhunter,
with a scarf across his mouth, and six or seven ropes knotted round his
elbows and ankles. His brown eyes were alive and shifted alertly.

Dr Orion Hood paused for one instant on the doormat and drank in the
whole scene of voiceless violence. Then he stepped swiftly across the
carpet, picked up the tall silk hat, and gravely put it upon the head
of the yet pinioned Todhunter. It was so much too large for him that it
almost slipped down on to his shoulders.

"Mr Glass's hat," said the doctor, returning with it and peering into
the inside with a pocket lens. "How to explain the absence of Mr Glass
and the presence of Mr Glass's hat? For Mr Glass is not a careless man
with his clothes. That hat is of a stylish shape and systematically
brushed and burnished, though not very new. An old dandy, I should
think."

"But, good heavens!" called out Miss MacNab, "aren't you going to untie
the man first?"

"I say 'old' with intention, though not with certainty" continued the
expositor; "my reason for it might seem a little far-fetched. The hair
of human beings falls out in very varying degrees, but almost always
falls out slightly, and with the lens I should see the tiny hairs in a
hat recently worn. It has none, which leads me to guess that Mr Glass is
bald. Now when this is taken with the high-pitched and querulous
voice which Miss MacNab described so vividly (patience, my dear lady,
patience), when we take the hairless head together with the tone common
in senile anger, I should think we may deduce some advance in years.
Nevertheless, he was probably vigorous, and he was almost certainly
tall. I might rely in some degree on the story of his previous
appearance at the window, as a tall man in a silk hat, but I think I
have more exact indication. This wineglass has been smashed all over
the place, but one of its splinters lies on the high bracket beside the
mantelpiece. No such fragment could have fallen there if the vessel
had been smashed in the hand of a comparatively