But that won't console either you or me, Mr. Delavoye, and I can't apologise enough. I only hope the scoundrels were no more successful here than they were at my house?"

"I'm afraid they didn't go quite so empty away."

"God bless my soul! Those cartridge makers ought to indemnify you. But perhaps they left some traces? That was the worst of it in my case--neither footmark nor finger-print worth anything to any body!"

"I'm afraid they left neither here."

"But you don't know that, Mr. Delavoye; you can't know it before morning. The frost broke up with the fog, you must remember, and the ground's as soft as butter. Which way did the blackguards run?"

"Through the garden and over the wall at the back into----"

"Then they _must_ have left their card this time!" said Colonel Cheffins, ten years younger in his excitement, and even more alert and wide-awake than we had found him the night before. He did not conceal his anxiety to conduct immediate investigations in the garden. But Uvo persuaded him to wait till we had finished our drinks, and we got him to sit down at the desk, trembling with keenness.

"You see," said Uvo, leaning forward in the arm-chair and opening a drawer in the pedestal between them, "one of them did leave something in the shape of a card, and here it is."

And there lay the cast shoe, in the open drawer, under the colonel's eyes and mine as I looked over his shoulder.

"Why, it's an evening pump!" he exclaimed.

"Exactly."

"Made by quite a good maker, I should say. All in one piece, without a seam, I mean."

"I see. I hadn't noticed that; but then I haven't your keen eye, colonel. You really must come out into the garden with us."

"I shall be delighted, and we might take this with us to fit into any tracks----"

"Precisely; but there's just one thing I should like you to do first, if you would," said Uvo deferentially, and I bent still further over the colonel's shiny head.

"What's that, Mr. Delavoye?"

"Just to try on the glass slipper--so to speak, Colonel Cheffins--because it's so extraordinarily like the 

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