“The door of the safe was wide open, and Mr. Ireland had evidently tottered and fainted before some awful fact which the open safe had revealed to him; he had caught himself against a chair which lay on the floor, and then finally sunk, unconscious, into the arm-chair.

“All this, which takes some time to describe,” continued the man in the corner, “took, remember, only a second to pass like a flash through Mrs. Ireland’s mind; she quickly turned the key of the glass door, which was on the inside, and with the help of James Fairbairn, the watchman, she carried her husband upstairs to his room, and immediately sent both for the police and for a doctor.

“As Mrs. Ireland had anticipated, her husband had received a severe mental shock which had completely prostrated him.  The doctor prescribed absolute quiet, and forbade all worrying questions for the present.  The patient was not a young man; the shock had been very severe—­it was a case, a very slight one, of cerebral congestion—­and Mr. Ireland’s reason, if not his life, might be gravely jeopardised by any attempt to recall before his enfeebled mind the circumstances which had preceded his collapse.

“The police therefore could proceed but slowly in their investigations.  The detective who had charge of the case was necessarily handicapped, whilst one of the chief actors concerned in the drama was unable to help him in his work.

“To begin with, the robber or robbers had obviously not found their way into the manager’s inner room through the bank premises.  James Fairbairn had been on the watch all night, with the electric light full on, and obviously no one could have crossed the outer office or forced the heavily barred doors without his knowledge.

“There remained the other access to the room, that is, the one through the hall of the house.  The hall door, it appears, was always barred and bolted by Mr. Ireland himself when he came home, whether from the theatre or his club.  It was a duty he never allowed any one to perform but himself.  During his annual holiday, with his wife and family, his son, who usually had the sub-manager to stay with him on those occasions, did the bolting and barring—­but with the distinct understanding that this should be done by ten o’clock at night.

“As I have already explained to you, there is only a glass partition between the general office and the manager’s private room, and, according to James Fairbairn’s account, this was naturally always left wide open so that he, during his night watch, would of necessity hear the faintest sound.  As a rule there was no light left in the manager’s room, and the other door—­that leading into the hall—­was bolted from the inside by James Fairbairn the moment he had satisfied himself that the premises were safe, and he had begun his night-watch.  An electric bell in both the offices communicated with Mr. Ireland’s bedroom and that of his son, Mr. Robert Ireland, and there was a telephone installed to the nearest district messengers’ office, with an understood signal which meant ‘Police.’