“She visited Italy sometimes and Joseph Pendean undoubtedly regretted his marriage.  He might have divorced her in the opinion of some with whom I spoke; but for the sake of his son he would not take this step.  Michael was devoted to his mother and accompanied her frequently to Italy.  On one of these occasions, when a boy of seventeen or eighteen, he met with an accident to his head; but I could glean no particulars of its nature.  He seems to have been a silent and observant lad and never quarrelled with his father.

“When at last Mrs. Pendean died in Italy, her husband attended the funeral at Naples and returned to England immediately afterward with his son.  The boy was subsequently apprenticed to a dentist, having expressed a wish to follow that profession.  He promised well, passed his examinations and practised at Penzance for a time.  But then he ceased to be interested in the work and presently joined his father.  In connection with the pilchard trade, he now visited Italy and often spent a month at a time in that country.

“Few could give me any information as to his nature, and pictures of him did not apparently exist; but an elderly relative was able to tell me that Michael had been a silent, difficult boy.  She also showed me an old photograph of his parents, taken together with their son when he must have been a child of three, or thereabout.  His father didn’t suggest a man of character; but Mrs. Pendean appeared to be a very handsome creature indeed, and it was at the moment I studied her features through a magnifying glass that I won my first conviction of a familiar likeness.

“It is a rule with me, when any sudden flash of intuition throws real or false light upon a case, to submit the inspiration to a most searching and destructive analysis and bring every known fact against it.  Thus, on seeing a possible glimpse of Giuseppe Doria’s beautiful countenance reflected upon my eyes from the photograph of the mother of Michael Pendean, I began to marshal all my knowledge to confound any deduction from that accident.  But judge of my interest and surprise when I found nothing that could be pointed to as absolute refutation of the theory now taking such swift shape in my mind.  Not one sure fact clashed with the possibility.

“Nothing at present was positively known by me which made it out of the question that Joseph Pendean’s wife should be the mother of Giuseppe Doria.  But none the less many facts might exist as yet beyond my knowledge, which would prove such a suspicion vain.  I considered how to obtain these facts and naturally my thought turned to Giuseppe himself.  To show you by what faltering steps we sometimes climb to safe ground, I may say that at this stage of my inquiry I had not imagined Doria and Michael Pendean were one and the same person.  That was to come.  For the moment I conceived of the possibility that Madame Pendean, a lady who had caused some fluttering in the Wesleyan dovecots of Penzance, might by chance have been the mother of a second son in her native country.  I imagined that Michael and an Italian half brother might know each other, and that the two were working together to destroy the brothers Redmayne, so that Michael’s wife should inherit all the family money.