on the wall?"

"No, sir."

"Perhaps Jake here can help us. He's been in the room often."

"The paper was blue; you know that; you saw it yourselves yesterday,"
blurted forth the man thus appealed to.

"Always blue? Never any other colour that you remember?"

"No; but I've been in the house only ten years."

"Oh, is that all! And do you mean to say that this room has not been
redecorated in ten years?"

"How can I tell? I can't remember every time a room is repapered."

"You ought to remember this one."

"Why?"

"Because of a very curious circumstance connected with it."

"I don't know of any circumstance."

"You heard what Miss Demarest had to say about a room whose walls were
covered with muddy pink scrolls."

"Oh, she!" His shrug was very expressive. Huldah continued to look down.

"Miss Demarest seemed to know what she was talking about," pursued the
coroner in direct contradiction of the tone he had taken the day before.
"Her description was quite vivid. It would be strange now if those walls
had once been covered with just such paper as she described."

An ironic stare, followed by an incredulous smile from Jake; dead
silence and immobility on the part of Huldah.

"Was it?" shot from Doctor Golden's lips with all the vehemence of
conscious authority.

There was an instant's pause, during which Huldah's breast ceased its
regular rise and fall; then the clerk laughed sharply and cried with the
apparent lightness of a happy-go-lucky temperament:

"I should like to know if it was. I'd think it a very curious
quin--quin----What's the word? quincedence, or something like that."

"The deepest fellow I know," grumbled the baffled coroner into
Hammersmith's ear, as the latter stepped his way, "or just the most
simple." Then added aloud: "Lift up my coat there, please."

Hammersmith did so. The garment mentioned lay across a small table which
formed the sole furnishing of the place, and when Hammersmith raised it,
there appeared lying underneath several small pieces of plaster which
Doctor Golden immediately pointed out to Jake.

"Do you see these bits from a papered wall?" he asked. "They were torn
from that of Number 3, between the breaking out of the fire and Mr.
Hammersmith's escape from the room. Come closer; you may look at them,
but keep your fingers off. You see that the coincidence you mentioned
holds."

Jake laughed again loudly, in a way he probably meant to express
derision; then he st