This was too much for Mrs. Aliston.

"Now, how _did_ you find that out?" she asks, with staring eyes.

"From my friend, the gardener," he replies. "Oh, I am quite familiar
with things about here. The very best place for a burglar to operate
would be these windows," motioning toward the front of the drawing room;
"he could stand in comfort on the lower balcony, screened by the upper,
and cut away at shutters and panes; but, our burglars knew that Miss
Wardour's rooms were directly above, and that Miss Wardour is a light
sleeper. Now, the very place that would be shunned by an unfamiliar
robber, is this very library window; it is higher than the others, has a
little thicket of shrubs just beneath it, and is overlooked from above,
being near an angle, by six windows. But our burglars knew that not one
of those rooms to which the six windows belong, are occupied; and that
the servants all sleep on the opposite side of the house. Now, then, I
say that the robbers knew Miss Wardour's sensitiveness to the effects of
chloroform; how else can we account for the fact of their giving just
enough to cause her to sleep, and not enough to cause any unpleasant
after effects. We can call it a coincidence, but it is one not likely to
happen; Doctor Heath knows that."

"True," responds Doctor Heath; "in a matter of this sort one would
hardly be likely to make so fortunate a blunder, or guess."

The detective pauses a moment, and then concludes: "My reasons for
saying that the robbers entered the garden by leaping the low fence just
below the gate, are, first, that gate creaks loudly when opened or shut,
and they knew this, and therefore avoided it; and, second, one of them,
the heavier of the two, came over with sufficient force to leave the
imprint of his right boot heel in the ground. It was the right heel,
because the deepest side of the indentation is to the right, and he
would naturally strike the ground with the weight resting on the outside
of the foot; and here, my friends, as the lawyers have it, I rest my
case."

"And a very clear case it looks," says Doctor Heath.

"How easily and naturally you come at these things," exclaims Constance,
in admiration. "It is a, b, c, to you, but it's awful Greek to the rest
of us. I begin to think detectives are born, not made."

"You think right, Miss Wardour," replies Bathurst. "It is the made
detectives who spoil and disgrace our profession."

"But," says Constance, with a look of a