“The first fact to startle us as we made our way up through the crowd which blocked halls and staircases was this:—­A doctor had been found and, though he had been forbidden to make more than a cursory examination of the body till the coroner came, he had not hesitated to declare after his first look, that the wound had not been made by a bullet but by some sharp and slender weapon thrust home by a powerful hand. (You mark that, Mr. Gryce.) As this seemed impossible in face of the fact that the door had been found buttoned on the inside, we did not give much credit to his opinion and began our work under the obvious theory of an accidental discharge of some gun from one of the windows across the court.  But the doctor was nearer right than we supposed.  When the coroner came to look into the matter, he discovered that the wound was not only too small to have been made by the ordinary bullet, but that there was no bullet to be found in the woman’s body or anywhere else.  Her heart had been reached by a thrust and not by a shot from a gun.  Mr. Gryce, have you not heard a startling repetition of this report in a case nearer at hand?

“But to go back.  This discovery, so important if true, was as yet—­that is, at the time of our entering the room,—­limited to the off-hand declaration of an irresponsible physician, but the possibility it involved was of so astonishing a nature that it influenced us unconsciously in our investigation and led us almost immediately into a consideration of the difficulties attending an entrance into, as well as an escape from, a room situated as this was.

“Up three flights from the court, with no communication with the adjoining rooms save through a door guarded on both sides by heavy pieces of furniture no one person could handle, the hall door buttoned on the inside, and the fire-escape some fifteen feet to the left, this room of death appeared to be as removed from the approach of a murderous outsider as the spot in the writing-room of the Clermont where Miss Challoner fell.

“Otherwise, the place presented the greatest contrast possible to that scene of splendour and comfort.  I had not entered the Clermont at that time, and no, such comparison could have struck my mind.  But I have thought of it since, and you, with your experience, will not find it difficult to picture the room where this poor woman lived and worked.  Bare walls, with just a newspaper illustration pinned up here and there, a bed—­tragically occupied at this moment—­a kitchen stove on which a boiler, half-filled with steaming clothes still bubbled and foamed,—­an old bureau,—­a large pine wardrobe against an inner door which we later found to have been locked for months, and the key lost,—­some chairs—­and most pronounced of all, because of its position directly before the window, a pine bench supporting a wash-tub of the old sort.