saving me the necessity of ringing.
The house seemed strangely quiet. The French cook was evidently down
in the basement, and we had probably all the upper part to ourselves,
unless Summertrees was in his study, which I doubted. Podgers led me
directly upstairs to the clerk's room on the third floor, walking on
tiptoe, with an elephantine air of silence and secrecy combined, which
struck me as unnecessary.

'I will make an examination of this room,' I said. 'Kindly wait for me
down by the door of the study.'

The bedroom proved to be of respectable size when one considers the
smallness of the house. The bed was all nicely made up, and there were
two chairs in the room, but the usual washstand and swing-mirror were
not visible. However, seeing a curtain at the farther end of the room,
I drew it aside, and found, as I expected, a fixed lavatory in an
alcove of perhaps four feet deep by five in width. As the room was
about fifteen feet wide, this left two-thirds of the space unaccounted
for. A moment later, I opened a door which exhibited a closet filled
with clothes hanging on hooks. This left a space of five feet between
the clothes closet and the lavatory. I thought at first that the
entrance to the secret stairway must have issued from the lavatory,
but examining the boards closely, although they sounded hollow to the
knuckles, they were quite evidently plain matchboarding, and not a
concealed door. The entrance to the stairway, therefore, must issue
from the clothes closet. The right hand wall proved similar to the
matchboarding of the lavatory as far as the casual eye or touch was
concerned, but I saw at once it was a door. The latch turned out to be
somewhat ingeniously operated by one of the hooks which held a pair of
old trousers. I found that the hook, if pressed upward, allowed the
door to swing outward, over the stairhead. Descending to the second
floor, a similar latch let me in to a similar clothes closet in the
room beneath. The two rooms were identical in size, one directly above
the other, the only difference being that the lower room door gave
into the study, instead of into the hall, as was the case with the
upper chamber.

The study was extremely neat, either not much used, or the abode of a
very methodical man. There was nothing on the table except a pile of
that morning's papers. I walked to the farther end, turned the key in
the lock, and came out upon the astonished Podgers.

'Well, I'm blowed!