was yet a certain air, not merely of truthfulness in the
narrator--that was not to be questioned--but of verisimilitude in
the narration, which had its effect, although it gave rise to no
conscious exercise of discriminating or ponderating faculty.
Leopold's air of conviction also, although of course that might well
accompany the merest invention rooted in madness, yet had its force,
persistently as George pooh-poohed it--which he did the more
strenuously from the intense, even morbid abhorrence of his nature
to being taken in, and having to confess himself of unstable
intellectual equilibrium. Possibly this was not the only kind of
thing in which the sensitiveness of a vanity he would himself have
disowned, had rendered him unfit for perceiving the truth. Nor do I
know how much there may be to choose between the two shames--that of
accepting what is untrue, and that of refusing what is true.

The second time he listened to Leopold's continuous narrative, the
doubt returned with more clearness and less flicker: there was such
a thing as being over-wise: might he not be taking himself in with
his own incredulity? Ought he not to apply some test? And did
Leopold's story offer any means of doing so?--One thing, he then
found, had been dimly haunting his thoughts ever since he heard it:
Leopold affirmed that he had thrown his cloak and mask down an old
pit-shaft, close by the place of murder: if there was such a shaft,
could it be searched?--Recurring doubt at length so wrought upon his
mind, that he resolved to make his holiday excursion to that
neighbourhood, and there endeavour to gain what assurance of any
sort might be to be had. What end beyond his own possible
satisfaction the inquiry was to answer he did not ask himself. The
restless spirit of the detective, so often conjoined with
indifference to what is in its own nature true, was at work in