“Now follow me and be honest.  You say certain things have happened.  I say they didn’t, for the very sound reason that they couldn’t.  I am not going to tell you the truth, because I am a long way from that myself, and I dare say you’ll strike it yet before I do; but I am going to prove that a good few things you think are true can’t be—­that events you take for granted never happened at all.  We’ve got but few senses and they are easily deluded.  In fact a man’s a darned clumsy box of tricks at his best and I wouldn’t swap a hill of beans for what my senses can assure me; but, as a wise man says, ‘Art is with us to save us from too much truth,’ so I say ’Reason is with us to save us from too much evidence of our senses—­often false.’

“Now see how reason bears on the evidence of Robert Redmayne and his trick acts since first he disappeared.  A thing occurs and there are only certain ways—­very limited in number—­to explain it.  Either Robert Redmayne killed Michael Pendean, or else he did not.  And if he did, he was sane or insane at the time.  That much can’t be denied and is granted.  If he was sane, he committed the murder with a motive; and pretty careful inquiry proves that no motive existed.  I attach no importance to words, no matter who may utter them, and the fact that Mrs. Pendean herself said that her husband and her uncle were the best of friends don’t weigh; but the fact that Robert Redmayne stopped at Princetown with the Pendeans for over a week in friendship and asked them to Paignton, is of some weight.  I’m inclined to believe that Redmayne was perfectly friendly with Michael Pendean up to the time of the latter’s disappearance, and that there was no shadow of motive to explain why Redmayne did in his brother-in-law.  Then, assuming him to be sane, he would not have committed such a murder.  The alternative is that he was mad at the time and did homicide on Pendean while out of his mind.

“But what happens to a madman after a crime of this sort?  Does he get off with it and wander over Europe as a free man for a year?  Granted the resources of maniacal cunning and all the rest of it, was it ever heard that a lunatic went at large as this man did, and laughed at Scotland Yard’s attempt to run him down and capture him?  Is it reasonable that he runs away with a corpse, disposes of it safely, returns to his lodgings, makes a meal, and then, in broad daylight, vanishes off the face of the earth for six months, presently to reappear, hoodwink fresh people, and commit another crime?  Once more he scorns law and order, vanishes for another six months, and now flaunts his red waistcoat and red mustache in Italy at his remaining brother’s door.  No, Mark, the man responsible for these impossible things isn’t mad.  And that brings me back to my preliminary alternative.