Mr. Ganns took snuff and proceeded.

"Now, having made this tremendous deduction, I looked over all the
facts again and they became very much more interesting. Every moment
I expected some crushing blow to shake my structure; at every turn I
guessed a certainty would come along and bowl my theory over; but no
such thing happened. Details, of course, there are--many little
pieces of the puzzle now known to only one man alive, and that is
Pendean himself; but the main incidents, the true picture, loomed
out clear enough for me before I left Dartmouth and came back to
Albert in London. The big things were all, not there to be shaken.
The picture was fogged at certain points, but I had no doubt as to
what it represented, and even the incredible details that seemed to
contradict reason were composed and cleaned up when Michael
Pendean's own temperament was brought as a solvent to them.

"Here, I think, we may spare a tribute of admiration to Pendean's
histrionics. I guess that his original conception and creation of
'Giuseppe Doria' was an exceedingly fine and well thought out piece
of acting. He actually lived in the character and day after day
exhibited qualities of mind and an attitude to life quite foreign to
his real rather saturnine and reserved nature. Both he and his wife
were heaven-born comedians as well as hell-born criminals.

"To return; the large particulars, then, were these: the foreground,
the middle distance and the background made a synthetic whole,
logically consistent, rational even--when you allow for the artist's
make-up. That he will leave a full statement before the end, I
venture to prophecy. His egregious vanity demands it. Nothing that
he writes is likely to be sincere and he'll have his eye on the