“Never,” laughed the manager. “This house has belonged to the Yates family for the past seventy years. The man evidently told you some fine fairy stories.”
“Evidently he did,” interposed old Feng. “You say that the man had a room over Mr. Yelverton’s. That is interesting. May we see it?”
“Certainly,” was the reply, and all of us ascended to a small, stuffy little single room on the second floor—the window of which was exactly over that of the room I had occupied.
I told them of that cold thing that I had felt pressed to my lips, but I could see that they were all incredulous—the hotel-manager most of all. Everybody who runs a hotel has a horror of any untoward happenings there, for, of course, they are apt seriously to prejudice business. In this case I was supposed to have attempted suicide, leaving a letter of apology to the Coroner. And I felt sure that the hotel-manager believed that I had attempted my life, even though he seemed to humor me and pretend to credit my story.
We had no police-officer with us. Feng had seen to it that we had gone to the hotel unaccompanied.
The Doctor showed an inquisitive eagerness quite unusual with him. He leaned out of the window in order to ascertain whether he could see inside the room below. Then from his pocket he took a piece of string and lowered it to the upper sash of the window of my room and made a knot in it. Afterwards he examined the window-sill very minutely.
“Has this window been cleaned since?” he asked the manager. “But there,” he added. “I see it hasn’t by its condition. Not for a fortnight—I should think—eh?”
“They were all cleaned about three weeks ago,” replied the bald-headed man.
“Now we will go down to the room in which Mr. Yelverton was found,” he said.
A few moments later we stood in the room wherein I had been attacked. The manager pointed out the table upon which the letter incriminating me had been found, and I gazed wonderingly around.