Page:Burton Stevenson--The marathon mystery.djvu/296

Rh I ran down the stairs and did as he directed, but could catch not a glimpse of him.

“Well?” he called down, coming to the open window.

“I can’t see you at all,” I said.

“I thought so. Come up again.”

He was sitting again at the table when I opened the door.

“Now, take a look at it, Lester,” he said. “You’ll see that the table is so far away from the window that it’s quite impossible for anyone on the ground outside to see the person sitting at it. Yet Drysdale stated distinctly that he saw Tremaine sitting at the table writing when he came back from that mysterious walk. What would you argue from that?”

“That Tremaine had moved the table nearer to the window.”

“And why should he do that?”

“To get a better light, perhaps,” I ventured.

“He might have done it, in the daytime, to get a better light, but at night he would get a much worse one over there by the window than here. The lights, you’ll observe, hang from the centre of the ceiling.”

“Then he did it,” I said, “in order that he might be seen from outside.”

“That’s it; not only that he might be seen, but that Drysdale might see him. I wonder if this is the kind of paper he wrote on?”

“We keep a supply of it in all th’ guest rooms, sir,” volunteered Thomas.

Godfrey took it up and looked at it. It was a plain white linen of good quality, with the word “Edge-