And then, in another almost simultaneous flash, "Could there have been two bullets? There were seven left in the pistol—the magazine carries eight—but you can get a ninth in if you place it in the chamber itself——"
All this, I say, crossed my mind in one hundredth part of the time it has taken you to read it.
And then came the drop. I was all wrong. That hole in the floor wasn't a bullet-hole at all. You can get a clean round bullet-hole in glass, but not in a floorboard. Neither does any pistol make a hole with a neat little rim of yellow metal glinting inside it.
I assure you I was already on my hands and knees by the side of that hole. It was five-eighths of an inch in diameter, perfectly round, with, as I say, that lining of what I at first took to be brass. I inserted my little finger, but the lining was firmly fixed. It did not run through the thickness of the board, but occupied perhaps an eighth of an inch about a third of the way down it. And the removal of my finger, clearing away a little grime, revealed something else. I lay down with my eye close to the hole. The ring was not of brass, but of gold.
Breathlessly I rose and looked about for an instrument. A screwdriver on the window-ledge caught my eye. Yes, a screwdriver would do. I seized it and crouched on the floor again. I worked for perhaps a minute. At the end of that time the slender circle of metal was loose in the palm of my hand.
Even without the tiny initials engraved inside it I should have known it. Tightly as it had been wedged, not one of its three little emeralds had been wrenched out. It was the engagement-ring I had seen on Mrs. Cunningham's finger on the morning of our breakfast.
VIII
Fantastic as had been the thoughts that during that fraction of time had whirled through my brain, the little gold circlet lying in my palm seemed to propound questions more fantastic still. How in the name of all that was inexplicable had Mrs. Cunningham's engagement-ring come to be there? Each momentary explanation at which I grasped seemed more lunatic than the rest. Had she simply lost it, sought for it and been unable to find it? Had it rolled of itself into that little five-eighths hole? Absurd, since even if by a miraculous chance it had rolled exactly there I had had to take a screwdriver to prise it out. Had she put it there, and for what reason? Ridiculous again, since ladies on the eve of their weddings do not use their rings for the jeweling of holes in one-inch floorboards. Yet if she had not put it there, what idiot had, and why? And what was the hole itself?
Again I was down on my hands and knees, examining the hole. Round—as perfectly round as if it had been drilled with a brace and bit—but not recent. It might at one time have given passage to a gas-pipe, a wire, a cord; it might have been a knot-hole. I peered down it. Nothing but blackness. I explored it again with my finger, and learned nothing new. Just an old hole, now scraped and jagged a little by the screwdriver.