nger of a blow from
fate, not the persistent illusion of the optimist, but an unsought
conviction, springing up like a bird from the heather, that success is
at hand in some great or little thing. The general suddenly knows at
dawn that the day will bring him victory; the man on the green suddenly
knows that he will put down the long putt. As Trent mounted the stairway
outside the library door he seemed to rise into certainty of
achievement.

A host of guesses and inferences swarmed apparently unsorted through his
mind; a few secret observations that he had made, and which he felt must
have significance, still stood unrelated to any plausible theory of the
crime; yet as he went up he seemed to know indubitably that light was
going to appear.

The bedrooms lay on either side of a broad carpeted passage, lighted by
a tall end-window. It went the length of the house until it ran at right
angles into a narrower passage, out of which the servants' rooms opened.
Martin's room was the exception: it opened out of a small landing
halfway to the upper floor. As Trent passed it, he glanced within. A
little square room, clean and commonplace. In going up the rest of the
stairway he stepped with elaborate precaution against noise, hugging the
wall closely and placing each foot with care; but a series of very
audible creaks marked his passage.

He knew that Manderson's room was the first on the right hand when the
bedroom floor was reached, and he went to it at once. He tried the latch
and the lock, which worked normally, and examined the wards of the key.
Then he turned to the room.

It was a small apartment, strangely bare. The plutocrat's toilet
appointments were of the simplest. All remained just as it had been on
the morning of the ghastly discovery in the grounds. The sheets and
blankets of the unmade bed lay tumbled over a narrow wooden bedstead,
and the sun shone brightly through the window upon them. It gleamed,
too, upon the gold parts of the delicate work of dentistry that lay in
water in a shallow bowl of glass placed on a small, plain table by the
bedside. On this also stood a wrought-iron candlestick. Some clothing
lay untidily over one of the two rush-bottomed chairs. Various objects
on the top of a chest of drawers, which had been used as a dressing
table, lay in such disorder as a hurried man might make--toilet
articles, a book of flies, an empty pocket-book with a burst strap, a
pocket compass and other trifles