The artist’s pride, that had prevented me from acting so that Ganns should have been invited to discover the murderer of Albert rather than set the task of preserving his friend’s life—­this false, foolish sense of superiority and security wrecked all.  Had Albert slept beneath the waters of Como before Ganns arrived, then not the wit of twenty Peters had ever found him; but while no man living could have saved the life of Redmayne, since had I determined to take it, the predestined sequel to his death was confounded by my own error.  Once more Ganns struck before I expected him to do so and I was, too late, confronted with the shattering truth.  He had in fact found me out.  He returned to England, worked like a mole, dug up my history, no doubt, and so came to the logical conclusion that it appeared more reasonable Michael Pendean should murder Robert Redmayne than the opposite.  Having reached this conviction, his reconstruction of each event threw added light; but even so it must have been a spark of prodigious inspiration that identified in Doria the vanished Cornishman.

Ganns is a great man on his own plane.  But, though he is a greedy creature who digs his grave with his knife and fork, though his habit of drenching himself with powdered tobacco, instead of smoking like a gentleman, is disgusting, yet I have nothing but admiration for him.  His little plot—­to treat me to a dose of my own physic and present a forgery of “Robert Redmayne” in the evening dusk—­was altogether admirable.  The thing came in a manner so sudden and unexpected that I failed of a perfect riposte.  To confess that I saw the ghost was dangerous; but to pretend afterwards that I had seen nothing was fatal.  His own immense cleverness, of course, appeared in assuring me that he saw nothing, thus tempting me to suspect that I had in reality been a victim of my own imagination.  From that moment the battle was joined and I stood at grave disadvantage.

How much or how little he had won from my slip I had yet to learn.  In any case the time was all too short, for I guessed now that Ganns must at least have associated me with the unknown—­he who had worn Redmayne’s clothes and had tried to shoot Brendon in his absence.  It was Jenny, of course, who had assisted me to dig Marco’s grave on Griante and who shared my disappointment when we found that Brendon had escaped my revolver.  Even so only the accident of biting his tongue saved him.  Had I not seen blood flowing from his lips, I should have fired again.

I was not aware that Peter proposed to arrest me on the night of Albert’s death, for upon what ground could he do so?  Indeed I judged that after my final operations were completed and Albert destroyed, good Ganns would swiftly prove, to his own satisfaction, that I could not be associated with that crime and so feel his whole theory open to suspicion.  Had I known that Peter was at his goal, my first thought might have been to disappear instantly and only appear again under a new impersonation, a year or two later, when the storm was over.  In that case I should have indicated how “Giuseppe Doria” had committed suicide and left every tactful and sufficing proof of the fact.