ttle cupboard, with eleven twenty-two on it. It
occurred to me that it might mean the twenty-second day of the eleventh
month, perhaps something that had happened on some momentous,
long-buried twenty-second of November. But this was May, and the finding
of two slips bearing the same number was too unusual.

After Hunter left I went back to the closet under the upper stairs, and
with some difficulty got the panel open again. The space inside, perhaps
eight feet high at one end and four at the other, was empty. There was a
row of hooks, as if at some time clothing had been hung there, and a
flat shelf at one end, gray with dust.

I struck another match and examined the shelf. On its surface were
numerous scratchings in the dust layer, but at one end, marked out as if
drawn on a blackboard, was a rectangular outline, apparently that of a
smallish box, and fresh.

My match burned my fingers and I dropped it to the floor, where it
expired in a sickly blue flame. At the last, however, it died
heroically--like an old man to whom his last hours bring back some of
the glory of his prime, burning brightly for a second and then fading
into darkness. The last flash showed me, on the floor of the closet and
wedged between two boards, a small white globule. It did not need
another match to tell me it was a pearl.

I dug it out carefully and took it to my room. In the daylight there I
recognized it as an unstrung pearl of fair size and considerable value.
There could hardly be a doubt that I had stumbled on one of the stolen
gems; but a pearl was only a pearl to me, after all. I didn't feel any
of the inspirations which fiction detectives experience when they happen
on an important clue.

I lit a cigar and put the pearl on the table in front of me. But no
explanation formed itself in the tobacco smoke. If Wardrop took the
pearls, I kept repeating over and over, if Wardrop took the pearls, who
took Miss Jane?

I tried to forget the pearls, and to fathom the connection between Miss
Maitland's disappearance and the absence of her brother-in-law. The
scrap of paper, eleven twenty-two, must connect them, but how? A family
scandal? Dismissed on the instant. There could be nothing that would
touch the virginal remoteness of that little old lady. Insanity? Well,
Miss Jane might have had a sudden aberration and wandered away, but that
would leave Fleming out, and the paper dragged him in. A common enemy?

I smoked and considered for s