’It now becomes evident that Ul-Jabal was one of the sect of the Assassins, and that the object of his sojourn at the manor-house, of his financial help to the baronet, of his whole journey perhaps to England, was the recovery of the sacred gem which once glittered on the breast of the founder of his sect.  In dread of spoiling all by over-rashness, he waits, perhaps for years, till he makes sure that the stone is the right one by seeing it with his own eyes, and learns the secret of the spring by which the chalice is opened.  He then proceeds to steal it.  So far all is clear enough.  Now, this too is conceivable, that, intending to commit the theft, he had beforehand provided himself with another stone similar in size and shape—­these being well known to him—­to the other, in order to substitute it for the real stone, and so, for a time at least, escape detection.  It is presumable that the chalice was not often opened by the baronet, and this would therefore have been a perfectly rational device on the part of Ul-Jabal.  But assuming this to be his mode of thinking, how ludicrously absurd appears all the trouble he took to engrave the false stone in an exactly similar manner to the other. That could not help him in producing the deception, for that he did not contemplate the stone being seen, but only heard in the cup, is proved by the fact that he selected a stone of a different colour.  This colour, as I shall afterwards show you, was that of a pale, brown-spotted stone.  But we are met with something more extraordinary still when we come to the last stone, the white one—­I shall prove that it was white—­which Ul-Jabal placed in the cup.  Is it possible that he had provided two substitutes, and that he had engraved these two, without object, in the same minutely careful manner?  Your mind refuses to conceive it; and having done this, declines, in addition, to believe that he had prepared even one substitute; and I am fully in accord with you in this conclusion.

’We may say then that Ul-Jabal had not prepared any substitute; and it may be added that it was a thing altogether beyond the limits of the probable that he could by chance have possessed two old gems exactly similar in every detail down to the very half-obliterated letters of the word “Hasn-us-Sabah.”  I have now shown, you perceive, that he did not make them purposely, and that he did not possess them accidentally.  Nor were they the baronet’s, for we have his declaration that he had never seen them before.  Whence then did the Persian obtain them?  That point will immediately emerge into clearness, when we have sounded his motive for replacing the one false stone by the other, and, above all, for taking away the valueless stone, and then replacing it.  And in order to lead you up to the comprehension of this motive, I begin by making the bold assertion that Ul-Jabal had not in his possession the real St. Edmundsbury stone at all.