“Now tell me what you saw.”

Francois was quite overwhelming in his desire to please.  Just what was going on in his mind I could not guess, nor did he betray it, but quickly he enumerated the objects on the table, gradually slowing up as the number which he recollected became exhausted.

“Were there candles?” prompted Craig, as the flow of Francois’s description ceased.

“Oh yes, candles,” he agreed, eagerly.

“Favors at each place?”

“Yes, sir.”

I could see no sense in the proceeding, yet knew Kennedy too well to suppose, for an instant, that he had not some purpose.

The questioning over, Kennedy withdrew, leaving poor Francois more mystified than ever.

“Well,” I exclaimed, as we passed through the dining-room, “what was all that?”

“That,” he explained, “is what is known to criminologists as the ‘Aussage test.’  Just try it some time when you get a chance.  If there are, say, fifty objects in a picture, normally a person may recall perhaps twenty of them.”

“I see,” I interrupted; “a test of memory.”

“More than that,” he replied.  “You remember that, at the end, I suggested several things likely to be on the table.  They were not there, as you might have seen if you had had the picture before you.  That was a test of the susceptibility to suggestion of the chef.  Francois may not mean to lie, but I’m afraid we’ll have to get along without him in getting to the bottom of the case.  You see, before we go any further we know that he is unreliable—­to say the least.  It may be that nothing at all happened in the kitchen to the mushrooms.  We’ll never discover it from him.  We must get it elsewhere.”

Miss Grey had been trying to straighten out some of the snarls which Mansfield’s business affairs had got into as a result of his illness; but it was evident that she had difficulty in keeping her mind on her work.

“The next thing I’d like to see,” asked Kennedy, when we rejoined her, “is that wall safe.”  She led the way down the hall and into an ante-room to Mansfield’s part of the suite.  The safe itself was a comparatively simple affair inside a closet.  Indeed, I doubt whether it had been seriously designed to be burglar-proof.  Rather it was merely a protection against fire.

“Have you any suspicion about when the robbery took place?” asked Kennedy, as we peered into the empty compartment.  “I wish I had been called in the first thing when it was discovered.  There might have been some chance to discover fingerprints.  But now, I suppose, every clue of that sort has been obliterated.”

“No,” she replied; “I don’t know whether it happened before or after Mr. Mansfield was discovered so ill by his valet.”

“But at least you can give me some idea of when the jewels were placed in the safe.”

“It must have been before the supper, right after our return from the theater.”