“You have stated the case with remarkable clearness,” he said; “and I am free to confess that some of the points that you have raised had escaped my notice.”

“My first idea,” Thorndyke resumed, “was that John Blackmore, taking advantage of the mental enfeeblement produced by the opium habit, had dictated this will to Jeffrey, It was then that I sought permission to inspect Jeffrey’s chambers; to learn what I could about him and to see for myself whether they presented the dirty and disorderly appearance characteristic of the regular opium-smoker’s den.  But when, during a walk into the City, I thought over the case, it seemed to me that this explanation hardly met the facts.  Then I endeavoured to think of some other explanation; and looking over my notes I observed two points that seemed worth considering.  One was that neither of the witnesses to the will was really acquainted with Jeffrey Blackmore; both being strangers who had accepted his identity on his own statement.  The other was that no one who had previously known him, with the single exception of his brother John, had ever seen Jeffrey at the inn.

“What was the import of these two facts?  Probably they had none.  But still they suggested the desirability of considering the question:  Was the person who signed the will really Jeffrey Blackmore?  The contrary supposition—­that some one had personated Jeffrey and forged his signature to a false will—­seemed wildly improbable, especially in view of the identification of the body; but it involved no actual impossibility; and it offered a complete explanation of the, otherwise inexplicable, coincidences that I have mentioned.

“I did not, however, for a moment, think that this was the true explanation, but I resolved to bear it in mind, to test it when the opportunity arose, and consider it by the light of any fresh facts that I might acquire.

“The new facts came sooner than I had expected.  That same evening I went with Dr. Jervis to New Inn and found Mr. Stephen in the chambers.  By him I was informed that Jeffrey was a learned Orientalist, with a quite expert knowledge of the cuneiform writing; and even as he was telling me this, I looked over his shoulder and saw a cuneiform inscription hanging on the wall upside down.

“Now, of this there could be only one reasonable explanation.  Disregarding the fact that no one would screw the suspension plates on a frame without ascertaining which was the right way up, and assuming it to be hung up inverted, it was impossible that the misplacement could have been overlooked by Jeffrey.  He was not blind, though his sight was defective.  The frame was thirty inches long and the individual characters nearly an inch in length—­about the size of the D 18 letters of Snellen’s test-types, which can be read by a person of ordinary sight at a distance of fifty-five feet.  There was, I repeat, only one reasonable explanation; which was that the person who had inhabited those chambers was not Jeffrey Blackmore.