at his watch, and went away. Now what was he looking for?”
I cudgelled my brain.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t imagine.”
“Let me help you,” said Godfrey, his eyes shining still more brightly. “I had time to think it all out in the closet there. In the first place, he looked only in the outer room; in the second place, he was plainly looking for something that had been purposely concealed; in the third place, when he examined the room, he placed his chair just where Miss Croydon had sat.”
A flash of light burst upon me.
“The clippings!” I cried.
“The clippings—just that. I haven’t the least doubt of it. And that explains another thing which seemed very puzzling—it explains why Miss Croydon was so anxious to rent this suite. Of course, if she hid the clippings here, she was desperately anxious to recover them, and she’d have got them if Higgins hadn’t been such a superstitious fool.”
Yes, that was plain enough; what had appeared so mysterious was really quite simple, after all. It is so with most mysteries, if one can only see rightly. The trouble is that most of us persist in trying to look beneath the surface instead of examining what is in plain sight. The admirable C. Auguste Dupin was quite right in remarking that truth does not always lie at the bottom of a well.
“But how did he find out about them?” I asked, at last. “Simmonds decided to keep that point to himself, and you have told no one except me.”
