re; the
mud of which should, therefore, have been conspicuous on his shoes.

"Thus, in a moment, a wildly speculative hypothesis had assumed a high
degree of probability.

"When Mr. Stephen was gone, Jervis and I looked over the chambers
thoroughly; and then another curious fact came to light. On the wall
were a number of fine Japanese colour-prints, all of which showed recent
damp-spots. Now, apart from the consideration that Jeffrey, who had been
at the trouble and expense of collecting these valuable prints, would
hardly have allowed them to rot on his walls, there arose the question:
How came they to be damp? There was a gas stove in the room, and a gas
stove has at least the virtue of preserving a dry atmosphere. It was
winter weather, when the stove would naturally be pretty constantly
alight. How came the walls to be so damp? The answer seemed to be that
the stove had not been constantly alight, but had been lighted only
occasionally. This suggestion was borne out by a further examination of
the rooms. In the kitchen there were practically no stores and hardly
any arrangements even for simple bachelor cooking; the bedroom offered
the same suggestion; the soap in the wash-stand was shrivelled and
cracked; there was no cast-off linen, and the shirts in the drawers,
though clean, had the peculiar yellowish, faded appearance that linen
acquires when long out of use. In short, the rooms had the appearance of
not having been lived in at all, but only visited at intervals.

"Against this view, however, was the statement of the night porter that
he had often seen a light in Jeffrey's sitting-room at one o'clock in
the morning, with the apparent implication that it was then turned out.
Now a light may be left in an empty room, but its extinction implies the
presence of some person to extinguish it; unless some automatic device
be adopted for putting it out at a given time. Such a device--the alarm
movement of a clock, for instance, with a suitable attachment--is a
simple enough matter, but my search of the rooms failed to discover
anything of the kind. However, when looking over the drawers in the
bedroom, I came upon a large box that had held a considerable quantity
of hard stearine candles. There were only a few left, but a flat
candlestick with numerous wick-ends in its socket accounted for the
remainder.

"These candles seemed to dispose of the difficulty. They were not
necessary for ordinary lighting, since gas w