indow-catches.

"Nobody could raise these windows without alarming the house," Grady
said, and pointed to a tiny wire running along the woodwork. "There's
a burglar alarm."

Simmonds assented, and finally the trio returned to the ante-room.

"We'd like to look over the rest of the house," Grady said to Rogers,
who was sitting erect again, looking more like himself, and the four
men went out into the hall together. I remained behind with Hughes
and Freylinghuisen. They had lifted the body to the couch and were
making a careful examination of it. Heavy at heart, I sat down near
by and watched them.

That Philip Vantine should have been killed by enthusiasm for the
hobby which had given him so much pleasure seemed the very irony of
fate, yet such I believed to be the case. To be sure, there were
various incidents which seemed to conflict with such a theory, and
the theory itself seemed wild to the point of absurdity; but at least
it was a ray of light in what had been utter darkness. I turned it
over and over in my mind, trying to fit into it the happenings of the
day--I must confess with very poor success. Freylinghuisen's voice
brought me out of my reverie.

"The two cases are precisely alike," he was saying. "The symptoms are
identical. And I'm certain we shall find paralysis of the heart and
spinal cord in this case, just as I did in the other. Both men were
killed by the same poison."

"Can you make a guess as to the nature of the poison?" Hughes
inquired.

"Some variant of hydrocyanic acid, I fancy--the odour indicates
that; but it must be about fifty times as deadly as hydrocyanic acid
is."

They wandered away into a discussion of possible variants, so
technical and be-sprinkled with abstruse words and formulae that I
could not follow them. Freylinghuisen, of course, had all this sort
of thing at his fingers' ends--post-mortems were his every-day
occupation, and no doubt he had been furbishing himself up, since
this last one, in preparation for the inquest, where he would
naturally wish to shine. I could see that he enjoyed displaying his
knowledge before Hughes, who, although a family practitioner of high
standing, with an income greater than Freylinghuisen's many times
over, had no such expert knowledge of toxicology as a coroner's
physician would naturally possess.

The two detectives and the coroner came back while the discussion was
still in progress and listened in silence to Freylinghuisen's
sta