id to have belonged in its day to Catherine de
Medicis--had worn loose, and could only be prevented from dropping out
and allowing the contents to drip away by wedging it into the orifice in
the capsule by winding the stopper with silk."

Narkom's face positively glowed.

"My dear Cleek, you give me the brightest kind of hope," he said
enthusiastically, as he stooped and investigated the tiny, perfumed
grease spots on the floor, so clearly made by the dropping of some oily
substance that there could be no question regarding their origin. "Then,
there can be no possibility of connecting young Geoff Clavering or the
girl he loves with this ghastly business if that Margot woman has been
here, and it was from her bracelet that these stains were dropped?
Besides, after what you said about that fellow of her crew who was
spiked to the wall as this poor wretch here is----"

"A moment, my friend--you are on the rush again," interjected Cleek.
"All that we actually _know_, at present, Mr. Narkom, is that some one,
and very likely a woman, has been here and--unconsciously, of
course--has spilled some drops of a very valuable and highly
concentrated perfume. This naturally points to a defective stopper to
the article containing that perfume, but whether or not that defective
stopper was one carved from a single emerald and wound with silk----"

He stopped and let the rest of the sentence go by default. All the while
he had been speaking he had been following, after the manner of a hound
on the scent, the trail of that perfume's lead; now it had brought him
to a litter of rat-gnawed paper and a parcel containing a peach and the
remnants of a roasted fowl. As if the scent seemed stronger here than
elsewhere--so strong, in fact, that it was suggestive of a goal--he
began tossing the scraps about, till at last he gave a sort of cry and
pounced upon something in a distant corner.

"Cleek!" rapped out Narkom in an excited but guarded tone, as he noted
this, "Cleek, you have found something? Something that decides?"

"Yes," the detective made answer. "Something which proves that, whoever
the woman who dropped the scent may be, Mr. Narkom, she was _not_
Margot!"

He unclosed his hand and stretched it out toward the superintendent, and
Narkom saw lying on his palm a crushed and gleaming thing which looked
like a child's gold thimble that had been trodden upon. The snapped
fragment of a hairlike gold chain still clung to it, and at t