“We—­we’re from up the river.  We don’t know anybody in this big town.”

As he spoke, he began to edge away from the wall, the girl following.

“Wait!” smiled the detective.  “You are getting out of place.  You were looking at the armor when you first heard the hubbub over there?”

Both were silent.

“What were you looking at?”

“I was looking at her, and her was looking at me,” stammered the man.  “We were—­were talking together here—­we didn’t notice——­”

“Just married, eh?”

“Yesterday noon, sir.  How—­how did you know?”

“I didn’t know; I only guessed.  And I think I can guess something else—­what your reason was for stealing into this dark corner.”

It was the man who now looked down, and the woman who looked up.  In a pinch of this kind, it is the woman who is the more courageous.

“He was a-kissin’ of me, sir,” she whispered in a frank but shamefaced way.  “There was no harm in that, was there?  We’re so fond of one another, and how could we know that anyone was dying so near?”

“No, there was no harm,” Mr. Gryce reluctantly admitted.  Caught in an absurdity amusing enough in its way, he would certainly under less strenuous circumstances have rather enjoyed his own humiliation.  But the occasion was too serious and his part in it too pronounced for him to take any pleasure in this misadventure.  In the prosecution of so daring a scheme for locating witnesses if not of discovering the actual user of the bow, it would not do to fail.  He must find the man he sought.  If the Curator—­but one glance into the room where that gentleman stood amid a litter of prints satisfied him that Sweetwater was right as to the impossibility of getting any information from this quarter.  Nor could he hope, remembering what he had himself seen, that he would succeed any better with the last person now remaining on this floor—­the young man busy with the coins in No.  I.

That he was to be so fortunate as to lay an immediate hand on the person who had shot the fatal arrow was no longer regarded by him as among the possibilities.  Whoever this person was, he had found a way of escape which rendered him for the time being safe from discovery.  But there was another possible miscalculation which he felt it his duty to recognize before he proceeded further in his difficult task.  The bow found back of the tapestry had every appearance of being the one used for the delivery of the arrow.  But was it?  Might it not, in some strange and unaccountable way, have been flung there previous to the present event and by some hand no longer in the building?  Such coincidences have been known, and while as a rule this old and experienced detective put little confidence in coincidences of any kind, he had but one thought in mind in approaching this final witness, which was to get from him some acknowledgment of having seen, on or about the time of the accident, a movement in the tapestry behind which this bow lay concealed.  If once this fact could be established, there could be no further question as to the direct connection between the bow there found and the present crime.