hall, as they discovered, when Lady Leake led them without
delay toward the scene of the necklace's mysterious vanishment, a
broad, short flight of richly carpeted stairs led to a square
landing, and thence another and a longer flight, striking off at
right angles, communicated with the passage upon which her ladyship's
boudoir opened.

"It was here that I stood, Mr. Cleek, when I recollected about the
necklace as I called Jennifer to me," she explained, pausing on
the landing at the foot of this latter flight of stairs just long
enough to let him note, over the broad rail of the banister, that the
great hall was clearly visible below. "He was there, just under
you, drying the globes of the music-room chandelier when I called
to him. Now come this way, please, and you will see how impossible
it is for any one to have entered and left the boudoir during my
brief absence without my seeing or hearing."

It was; for the door of the boudoir, which was entirely detached
from the rest of the suite occupied by herself and her husband, was
immediately opposite the head of the staircase and clearly visible
from the landing at its foot.

She unlocked this one solitary door, and let them see that the
only other means of possibly entering the room was by way of a large
overhanging bay window overlooking the grounds. But this was a
good twenty feet above the surface of the earth and there was not a
vine nor a tree within yards and yards of it, and as the space
beneath was so large and clear that no one could have manipulated a
ladder without the certainty of discovery, Cleek saw at a glance
that the window might be dismissed at once as a possible point
of entry.

Nor did anything else about the room offer a hint more promising.
All that he saw was just what one might have expected to see in such
a place under such circumstances as these.

On the dressing-table, surrounded by a litter of silver and cut-glass
toilet articles, lay the case which had once contained the famous
necklace, wide open and empty. Over the back of a chair--as if
it had been thrown there under the stress of haste and great
excitement--hung a negligee of flowered white silk trimmed with
cascades of rich lace, and across a sofa at the far end of the
room, a dinner gown of gray satin was carefully spread out, with a
pair of gray silk stockings and gray satin slippers lying beside it.

"Everything is exactly as it was, Mr. Cleek, at the time the necklace
di