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to unlock your room; otherwise the maid wouldn't have been able to tidy it for you."

"To unlock it? When did you lock it, then?"

"When I left it, to be sure, at twelve o'clock last night."

"What! Do you mean to say that Gordon and I sat there for a solid hour waiting for somebody to go into my room, when the door was locked all the time? Look here, Carmichael, if you've simply been pulling our legs⁠———"

"No, I have not been pulling your legs, if I apprehend rightly the meaning of that rather puzzling metaphor. You were waiting for somebody to try to get into your room; if he had tried, he would have found two muscular young men tackling him from behind, and the possibility of getting through the door would have had a merely academic interest."

"But I thought you said we were to catch him red-handed? Pretty good fools we should have looked if we had found that it was some guest who'd mistaken his room, or somebody who was wanting to borrow a pipe-cleaner!"

"I admit it. But then, you see, I had an intuition, almost amounting to a certainty, that the visitor who intruded upon your room does not come in through the door."

"Oh, he doesn't? Then you mean that Gordon and I were merely sacrificed to your peculiar sense of humour⁠—we weren't really doing any good? My word, Carmichael⁠———"