taken place that very week. This would account for the electric light
being still intact. Rachel discovered it by picking up a crumpled
newspaper, which seemed to have contained bread and cheese; it did
contain a report of the first day of the trial. They might have waited
till her trial was over; they should suffer for their impatience, it was
their turn. So angry was Rachel that her own room wounded her with no
memories of the past. It was an empty room, and nothing more; and only
on her return to the lower floor did that last dread night come back to
her in all its horror and all its pitifulness.

The double doors of the late professor! Rachel forgot her grudge against
his widow; she pulled the outer door, and pushed the inner one, just as
she had done in the small hours of that fatal morning, but this time all
was darkness within. She had to put on the electric light for herself.
The necessity she could not have explained, but it existed in her mind;
she must see the room again. And the first thing she saw was that the
window was broken still.

Rachel looked at it more closely than she had done on the morning when
she had given her incriminating opinion to the police, and the longer
she looked the less reason did she see to alter that opinion. The broken
glass might have been placed upon the sill in order to promote the very
theory which had been so gullibly adopted by the police, and the watch
and chain hidden in the chimney for the same purpose. They might have
hanged the man who kept them; and surely this was not the first thief
who had slunk away empty-handed after the committal of a crime
infinitely greater than the one contemplated.

Rachel had never wavered in these ideas, but neither had she dwelt on
them to any extent, and now they came one instant only to go the next.