. You can do that, Boyd. It will be easy to
see if there are any traces of blood upon it. To all appearances it
has been recently cleaned and oiled."

"Short admits cleaning it, but he says he did so three days ago," I
exclaimed.

He gave vent to another low grunt, from which I knew that the
explanation was unsatisfactory, and replaced the knife in its faded
velvet sheath.

Save for the man upon whom suspicion had thus fallen, the servants had
all gone to the house where their mistress was lodged, after being
cautioned by the police to say nothing of the matter, and to keep
their mouths closed to all the reporters who would no doubt very soon
be swarming into the district eager for every scrap of information.
Their evidence would be required at the inquest, and the police
forbade them, until then, to make any comment, or to give any
explanation of the mysterious affair. The tongues of domestics wag
quickly and wildly in such cases, and have many times been the means
of defeating the ends of justice by giving away important clues to the
Press.

Ambler Jevons, however, was a practised hand at mysteries. He sat down
in the library, and with his crabbed handwriting covered two sheets of
paper with notes upon the case. I watched as his pencil went swiftly
to work, and when he had finished I saw him underline certain words he
had written.

"Thorpe appears to suspect that fellow Short," he remarked, when I met
him again in the library a quarter of an hour later. "I've just been
chatting with him, and to me his demeanour is not that of a guilty
man. He's actually been upstairs with the coroner's officer in the
dead man's room. A murderer generally excuses himself from entering
the presence of his victim."

"Well," I exclaimed, after a pause, "you know the whole circumstances
now. Can you see any clue which may throw light on the affair?"

He slowly twisted his moustache again; then twisted his plain gold
ring slowly round the little finger on the left hand--a habit of his
when perplexed.

"No, Ralph, old chap; can't say I do," he answered. "There's an
unfathomable mystery somewhere, but in what direction I'm utterly at a
loss to distinguish."

"But do you think that the assassin is a member of the household? That
seems to me our first point to clear up."

"That's just where we're perplexed. Thorpe suspects Short; but the
police so often rush to conclusions on a single suspicion. Before
condemning him it is necess