“Mr. Gryce, I have heard you say yourself that this question of time has been, from the first, our greatest difficulty.  Even with these three means of escape in our minds, it is difficult to see how it was possible for anyone to get from the gallery to the court in the minute or so elapsing between the cry of the dying girl and the appearance at her side of the man studying coins in the adjoining section.”

“You are right.  There was a delay somewhere, as we shall find later on.  But granting this delay, a man would have to move fast to go the full length of the court from the Curator’s room even in the time which this small delay might afford him.  But perhaps you cut this inextricable knot by locating Correy somewhere else than where he placed himself at the making of the chart.”

“No, I cut it in another way.  You remember my starting to tell you just now how, in my dissatisfaction with a certain portion of my dream, I refused to believe in the escape of my Mr. X by the way of the Curator’s office.  The tapestry was lifted, the bow flung behind, but the man stepped back instead of forward.  An open flight along the gallery commended itself more to him than the doubtful one previously arranged for.  If you will accept that for fact, which of course you will not, it is easy to see how Correy might have been somewhere on that staircase when the inspiration came to turn the appearance of flight into a show of his own innocence, by a quick rush back into the further gallery and a consequent loud-mouthed alarm.  But I see that I am but getting deeper and deeper in the quagmire of a bad theory badly stated.  I am forgetting——­”

“Many things, Sweetwater.  I will only mention a very simple one.  The man who shot the arrow wore gloves.  You wouldn’t attribute any such extraordinary precaution as that to a fellow shooting an arrow across the court on a dare?”

“You wouldn’t expect it, sir.  But in going about the museum that afternoon, I came upon Correy’s coat hanging on its peg.  In one of its pockets was a pair of kid gloves.”

“You say the fellow is courting a rich girl,” suggested Mr. Gryce.  “Under those circumstances some show of vanity is excusable.  Certainly he would not carry his folly so far as to put on gloves for the shooting match with which you credit him, unless there was criminal intent back of his folly—­which, of course, would be as hard for you as for me to believe.”

Sweetwater winced, but noting the kindly twinkle with which Mr. Gryce softened the bitterness of this lesson, he brightened again and listened with becoming patience as the old man went on to say: 

“To discuss probabilities in connection with this other name seems futile this morning.  The ease with which one can twist the appearances of things to fit a preconceived theory as exemplified by the effort you have just made warns us to be chary of pushing one’s idea too far without the firmest of bases to support it.  If you find a man’s coat showing somewhere on its lining evidences that there had once been sewed to it a loop of the exact dimensions of the one I passed over to you last night, I should consider it a much more telling clue to the personality of X than a pair of gloves in the pocket of a man who in all probability intends to finish up the day with a call on the girl he admires.”