ived at his chambers, and a modest flourish on
the little brass knocker of the inner door was answered by my quondam
teacher himself.

"How good of you, Berkeley," he said, shaking hands genially, "to look
me up so early. I am alone, just looking through the report of the
evidence of yesterday's proceedings."

He placed an easy chair for me, and, gathering up a bundle of
typewritten papers, laid them aside on the table.

"Were you surprised at the decision?" I asked.

"No," he answered. "Two years is a short period of absence; but still,
it might easily have gone the other way. I am greatly relieved. The
respite gives us time to carry out our investigations without undue
hurry."

"Did you find my notes of any use?" I asked.

"Heath did. Polton handed them to him, and they were invaluable to him
for his cross-examination. I haven't seen them yet; in fact, I have
only just got them back from him. Let us go through them together now."

He opened a drawer and taking from it my notebook, seated himself, and
began to read through my notes with grave attention, while I stood and
looked shyly over his shoulder. On the page that contained my sketches
of the Sidcup arm, showing the distribution of the snails' eggs on the
bones, he lingered with a faint smile that made me turn hot and red.

"Those sketches look rather footy," I said; "but I had to put something
in my notebook."

"You did not attach any importance, then, to the facts that they
illustrated?"

"No. The egg-patches were there, so I noted the fact. That's all."

"I congratulate you, Berkeley. There is not one man in twenty who
would have had the sense to make a careful note of what he considers an
unimportant or irrelevant fact; and the investigator who notes only
those things that appear significant is perfectly useless. He gives
himself no material for reconsideration. But you don't mean that these
egg-patches and worm-tubes appeared to you to have no significance at
all?"

"Oh, of course, they show the position in which the bones were lying."

"Exactly. The arm was lying, fully extended, with the dorsal side
uppermost. But we also learn from these egg-patches that the hand had
been separated from the arm before it was thrown into the pond; and
there is something very remarkable in that."

I leaned over his shoulder and gazed at my sketches, amazed at the
rapidity with which he had reconstructed the limb from my rough
drawings of the