he had carried in his mouth every day for years, and which
contained all the visible teeth of the upper jaw. It had evidently not
been a case of frantic hurry; and even if it had been, he would have
been more likely to forget almost anything than this denture. Any one
who wears such a removable plate will agree that the putting it in on
rising is a matter of second nature. Speaking as well as eating, to say
nothing of appearances, depend upon it.

Neither of these queer details, however, seemed to lead to anything at
the moment. They only awakened in me a suspicion of something lurking in
the shadows, something that lent more mystery to the already mysterious
question how and why and through whom Manderson met his end.

With this much of preamble I come at once to the discovery which, in the
first few hours of my investigation, set me upon the path which so much
ingenuity had been directed to concealing.

I have already described Manderson's bedroom, the rigorous simplicity
of its furnishing, contrasted so strangely with the multitude of clothes
and shoes, and the manner of its communication with Mrs Manderson's
room. On the upper of the two long shelves on which the shoes were
ranged I found, where I had been told I should find them, the pair of
patent leather shoes which Manderson had worn on the evening before his
death. I had glanced over the row, not with any idea of their giving me
a clue, but merely because it happens that I am a judge of shoes, and
all these shoes were of the very best workmanship. But my attention was
at once caught by a little peculiarity in this particular pair. They
were the lightest kind of lace-up dress shoes, very thin in the sole,
without toe-caps, and beautifully made, like all the rest. These shoes
were old and well worn; but being carefully polished, and fitted, as all
the shoes were, upon their trees, they looked neat enough. What caught
my eye was a slight splitting of the leather in that part of the upper
known as the vamp--a splitting at the point where the two laced parts of
the shoe rise from the upper. It is at this point that the strain
comes when a tight shoe of this sort is forced upon the foot, and it
is usually guarded with a strong stitching across the bottom of the
opening. In both the shoes I was examining this stitching had parted,
and the leather below had given way. The splitting was a tiny affair in
each case, not an eighth of an inch long, and the torn edges havi