“Is this of any interest to you?” I asked.

Thorndyke took the bead and examined it curiously.

“It is certainly,” he said, “a very odd thing to find in the bedroom of an old bachelor like Jeffrey, especially as we know that he employed no woman to look after his rooms.  Of course, it may be a relic of the last tenant.  Let us see if there are any more.”

We renewed our search, crawling under the bed and throwing the light of the lamp in all directions over the floor.  The result was the discovery of three more beads, one entire bugle and the crushed remains of another, which had apparently been trodden on.  All of these, including the fragments of the bugle that had been crushed, Thorndyke placed carefully on the paper, which he laid on the dressing-table the more conveniently to examine our find.

“I am sorry,” said he, “that there are no more fragments of the watch-glass, or whatever it was.  The broken pieces were evidently picked up, with the exception of the one that I trod on, which was an isolated fragment that had been overlooked.  As to the beads, judging by their number and the position in which we found some of them—­that crushed bugle, for instance—­they must have been dropped during Jeffrey’s tenancy and probably quite recently.”

“What sort of garment do you suppose they came from?” I asked.

“They may have been part of a beaded veil or the trimming of a dress, but the grouping rather suggests to me a tag of bead fringe.  The colour is rather unusual.”

“I thought they looked like black beads.”

“So they do by this light, but I think that by daylight we shall find them to be a dark, reddish-brown.  You can see the colour now if you look at the smaller fragments of the one that is crushed.”

He handed me his lens, and, when I had verified his statement, he produced from his pocket a small tin box with a closely-fitting lid in which he deposited the paper, having first folded it up into a small parcel.

“We will put the pencil in too,” said he; and, as he returned the box to his pocket he added:  “you had better get one of these little boxes from Polton.  If is often useful to have a safe receptacle for small and fragile articles.”

He folded up and replaced the dead man’s clothes as we had found them.  Then, observing a pair of shoes standing by the wall, he picked them up and looked them over thoughtfully, paying special attention to the backs of the soles and the fronts of the heels.

“I suppose we may take it,” said he, “that these are the shoes that poor Jeffrey wore on the night of his death.  At any rate there seem to be no others.  He seems to have been a fairly clean walker.  The streets were shockingly dirty that day, as I remember most distinctly.  Do you see any slippers?  I haven’t noticed any.”

He opened and peeped into a cupboard in which an overcoat surmounted by a felt hat hung from a peg like an attenuated suicide; he looked in all the corners and into the sitting-room, but no slippers were to be seen.