He was not sure.  He went into his consulting room and was gone for some time.  I took the opportunity to glance over his books and over the room.

Arthur Wells’s stick was standing in a corner, and I took it up and examined it.  It was an English malacca, light and strong, and had seen service.  It was long, too long for me; it occurred to me that Wells had been about my height, and that it was odd that he should have carried so long a stick.  There was no ease in swinging it.

From that to the memory of Hawkins’s face when Sperry took it, the night of the murder, in the hall of the Wells house, was only a step.  I seemed that day to be thinking considerably about Hawkins.

When Sperry returned I laid the stick on the table.  There can be no doubt that I did so, for I had to move a book-rack to place it.  One end, the handle, was near the ink-well, and the ferrule lay on a copy of Gibson’s “Life Beyond the Grave,” which Sperry had evidently been reading.

Sperry had found the letter.  As I glanced at it I recognized the writing at once, thin and rather sexless, Spencerian.

Dear Sir:  Since Mr. Wells’s death I am out of employment.  Before I took the position of butler with Mr. Wells I was valet to Mr. Ellingham, and before that, in England, to Lord Condray.  I have a very good letter of recommendation from Lord Condray.  If you need a servant at this time I would do my best to give satisfaction.

(Signed) Arthur Hawkins.

I put down the application, and took the anonymous letter about the bag from my pocketbook.  “Read this, Sperry,” I said.  “You know the letter.  Mrs. Dane read it to us Saturday night.  But compare the writing.”

He compared the two, with a slight lifting of his eyebrows.  Then he put them down.  “Hawkins!” he said.  “Hawkins has the letters!  And the bag!”

“Exactly,” I commented dryly.  “In other words, Hawkins was in Miss Jeremy’s house when, at the second sitting, she told of the letters.”

I felt rather sorry for Sperry.  He paced the room wretchedly, the two letters in his hand.

“But why should he tell her, if he did?” he demanded.  “The writer of that anonymous letter was writing for only one person.  Every effort is made to conceal his identity.”

I felt that he was right.  The point was well taken.

“The question now is, to whom was it written?” We pondered that, to no effect.  That Hawkins had certain letters which touched on the Wells affair, that they were probably in his possession in the Connell house, was clear enough.  But we had no possible authority for trying to get the letters, although Sperry was anxious to make the attempt.

“Although I feel,” he said, “that it is too late to help her very much.  She is innocent; I know that.  I think you know that, too, deep in that legal mind of yours.  It is wrong to discredit her because I did a foolish thing.”  He warmed to his argument.  “Why, think, man,” he said.  “The whole first sitting was practically coincident with the crime itself.”