The old man puckered up his eyebrows, as if genuinely anxious to remember something that would please the man who had shown him so much sympathy.
"I can't think of anything, sir," he said at length, apologetically, "only the marmalade, and that, of course, wouldn't——"
"The marmalade?" Malcolm Sage turned quickly.
"It was nothing, sir," said the old man. "Perhaps I oughtn't to have mentioned it; but the morning before we found him, the master had not eaten any marmalade, and him so fond of it. I was rather worried, and I asked Mrs. Graham if it was a new brand, thinking perhaps he didn't like it; but I found it was the same he always had."
For fully a minute Malcolm Sage was silent, gazing straight before him.
"He never smoked?" he asked at length.
"Never, sir, not during the whole thirty years I've been with him."
"Who cleaned the laboratory? It did not look as if it had been unswept for a week."
"No, indeed, sir," was the reply, "the professor was very particular. He always swept it up himself each morning. It was cleaned by one of the servants once a month."
"You're sure about the sweeping-up?" Malcolm Sage enquired with a keen glance that with him always meant an important point.