“She is lying, Sperry,” I said.  “He fell somewhere else, and she dragged him to where he was found.”

“But—­why?”

“I don’t know,” I said impatiently.  “From some place where a man would be unlikely to kill himself, I daresay.  No one ever killed himself, for instance, in an open hallway.  Or stopped shaving to do it.”

“We have only Miss Jeremy’s word for that,” he said, sullenly.  “Confound it, Horace, don’t let’s bring in that stuff if we can help it.”

We stared at each other, with the strop and the sponge between us.  Suddenly he turned on his heel and went back into the room, and a moment later he called me, quietly.

“You’re right,” he said.  “The poor devil was shaving.  He had it half done.  Come and look.”

But I did not go.  There was a carafe of water in the bathroom, and I took a drink from it.  My hands were shaking.  When I turned around I found Sperry in the hall, examining the carpet with his flash light, and now and then stooping to run his hand over the floor.

“Nothing here,” he said in a low tone, when I had joined him.  “At least I haven’t found anything.”

IV

How much of Sperry’s proceeding with the carpet the governess had seen I do not know.  I glanced up and she was there, on the staircase to the third floor, watching us.  I did not know, then, whether she recognized me or not, for the Wellses’ servants were as oblivious of the families on the street as their employers.  But she knew Sperry, and was ready enough to talk to him.

“How is she now?” she asked.

“She is sleeping, Mademoiselle.”

“The children also.”

She came down the stairs, a lean young Frenchwoman in a dark dressing gown, and Sperry suggested that she too should have an opiate.  She seized at the idea, but Sperry did not go down at once for his professional bag.

“You were not here when it occurred, Mademoiselle?” he inquired.

“No, doctor.  I had been out for a walk.”  She clasped her hands.  “When I came back—­”

“Was he still on the floor of the dressing-room when you came in?”

“But yes.  Of course.  She was alone.  She could not lift him.”

“I see,” Sperry said thoughtfully.  “No, I daresay she couldn’t.  Was the revolver on the floor also?”

“Yes, doctor.  I myself picked it up.”

To Sperry she showed, I observed, a slight deference, but when she glanced at me, as she did after each reply, I thought her expression slightly altered.  At the time this puzzled me, but it was explained when Sperry started down the stairs.

“Monsieur is of the police?” she asked, with a Frenchwoman’s timid respect for the constabulary.

I hesitated before I answered.  I am a truthful man, and I hate unnecessary lying.  But I ask consideration of the circumstances.  Neither then nor at any time later was the solving of the Wells mystery the prime motive behind the course I laid out and consistently followed.  I felt that we might be on the verge of some great psychic discovery, one which would revolutionize human thought and to a certain extent human action.  And toward that end I was prepared to go to almost any length.