“Miss Lloyd always sends her things to Carter & Brown’s,” she said.

Now, Carter & Brown was the firm name on the advertisement, and it was evident at once that the coroner considered this a damaging admission.

He sat looking greatly troubled, but before he spoke again, Mr. Parmalee made an observation that decidedly raised that young man in my estimation.

“Well,” he said, “that’s pretty good proof that the gold bag doesn’t belong to Miss Lloyd.”

“How so?” asked the coroner, who had thought quite the contrary.

“Why, if Miss Lloyd always sends her goods to be cleaned to Carter & Brown, why would she need to cut their address from a newspaper and save it?”

At first I thought the young man’s deduction distinctly clever, but on second thought I wasn’t so sure.  Miss Lloyd might have wanted that address for a dozen good reasons.  To my mind, it proved neither her ownership of the gold bag, nor the contrary.

In fact, I thought the most important indication that the bag might be hers lay in the story Elsa told about the cousin who sailed to Germany.  Somehow that sounded untrue to me, but I was more than willing to believe it if I could.

I longed for Fleming Stone, who, I felt sure, could learn from the bag and its contents the whole truth about the crime and the criminal.

But I had been called to take charge of the case, and my pride forbade me to call on any one for help.

I had scorned deductions from inanimate objects, but I resolved to study that bag again, and study it more minutely.  Perhaps there were some threads or shreds caught in its meshes that might point to its owner.  I remembered a detective story I read once, in which the whole discovery of the criminal depended on identifying a few dark blue woollen threads which were found in a small pool of candle grease on a veranda roof.  As it turned out, they were from the trouser knee of a man who had knelt there to open a window.  The patent absurdity of leaving threads from one’s trouser knee, amused me very much, but the accommodating criminals in fiction almost always leave threads or shreds behind them.  And surely a gold-mesh bag, with its thousands of links would be a fine trap to catch some threads of evidence, however minute they might be.

Furthermore I decided to probe further into that yellow rose business.  I was not at all sure that those petals I found on the floor had anything to do with Miss Lloyd’s roses, but it must be a question possible of settlement, if I went about it in the right way.  At any rate, though I had definite work ahead of me, my duty just now was to listen to the forthcoming evidence, though I could not help thinking I could have put questions more to the point than Mr. Monroe did.

Of course the coroner’s inquest was not formally conducted as a trial by jury would be, and so any one spoke, if he chose, and the coroner seemed really glad when suggestions were offered him.