On the window-sill of her little hanging chamber, which the women allowed him to inspect, he found some threads of long, black, glossy hair caught by a splinter in the wood.
They were Myrtle's of course.

A simpleton might have constructed a tragedy out of this trivial circumstance,--how she had cast herself from the window into the waters beneath it,--how she had been thrust out after a struggle, of which this shred from her tresses was the dreadful witness,--and so on.

Murray Bradshaw did not stop to guess and wonder.
He said nothing about it, but wound the shining threads on his finger, and, as soon as he got home, examined them with a magnifier.

They had been cut off smoothly, as with a pair of scissors.

This was part of a mass of hair, then, which had been shorn and thrown from the window.
Nobody would do that but she herself.