the stairway outside the library door he seemed to rise into certainty of
achievement. A host of guesses and inferences swarmed apparently unsorted
through his mind; a few secret observations that he had made, and which he
felt must have significance, still stood unrelated to any plausible theory of
the crime; yet as he went up he seemed to know indubitably that light was
going to appear.

The bedrooms lay on either side of a broad carpeted passage, lighted by a tall
end window. It went the length of the house until it ran at right angles into
a narrower passage, out of which the servants' rooms opened. Martin's room was
the exception: it opened out of a small landing half-way to the upper floor.
As Trent passed it he glanced within. A little square room, clean and
commonplace. In going up the rest of the stairway he stepped with elaborate
precaution against noise, hugging the wall closely and placing each foot with
care; but a series of very audible creaks marked his passage.

He knew that Manderson's room was the first on the right hand when the bedroom
floor was reached, and he went to it at once. He tried the latch and the lock,
which worked normally, and examined the wards of the key. Then he turned to
the room.

It was a small apartment, strangely bare. The plutocrat's toilet appointments
were of the simplest. All remained just as it had been on the morning of the
ghastly discovery in the grounds. The sheets and blankets of the unmade bed
lay tumbled over a narrow wooden bedstead, and the sun shone brightly through
the window upon them. It gleamed, too, upon the gold parts of the delicate
work of dentistry that lay in water in a shallow bowl of glass placed on a
small, plain table by the bedside. On this also stood a wrought-iron
candlestick. Some clothing lay untidily over one of the two rush-bottomed
chairs. Various objects on the top of a chest of drawers, which had been used