So far the story seems clear and plausible, assuming that a lady, in such a delicate state of health, could bear the fatigues of so long and trying a journey as that from Rheims to Paris.  But from this stage the mystery, which it took so many wise heads to penetrate in future years, begins to thicken.  Although the children were said to have been born on the 10th of July it was not until eleven days later that Mrs Hewit imparted the news to the two maids who had been left behind at Rheims, in the letter from which I have quoted.  Further, although the Colonel wrote to six different people on the 10th not one of his letters contains any reference to such an interesting event, which should, one would think, have excluded all other topics from a father’s pen.

Moreover, although the Colonel and his wife were, as the house-books proved, staying on the 10th of July at the hotel of a M. Godefroi, neither the landlord nor his wife had any knowledge that a birth had taken place, or was even expected; and it was beyond question that the lady left the house on the 13th, three days after the alleged event, without exciting any suspicion as to what had so mysteriously taken place.

On the 13th, the Colonel and his lady, accompanied by Mrs Hewit, declared that they went for a few days to the house of a Madame la Brune, a nurse—­but no child, M. and Mme. Godefroi swore, accompanied them; and on the 18th of July, eight days after the accouchement, they made their appearance at Michele’s Hotel (still without a solitary infant to show), where Madame was already so far recovered that she spent the days in jaunting about Paris and making trips to Versailles.

At Michele’s the story they told was that the infants were so delicate that they had been sent into the country to nurse; and yet none had seen them go.  But before the parents had been a day in their new quarters the Colonel, after hours of absence, appeared with a child—­a puny infant, but still unmistakably genuine.  Thus one of the twins was accounted for.  The other, they declared, was still more delicate and must be left in the country.

It was quite certain that the children had not been born either at Godefroi’s or Michele’s Hotel.  As for the intermediate place of lodging, the most diligent later enquiries failed to discover either Madame la Brune or the house in which she was supposed to live in the Faubourg St Germain.  Moreover, was it a coincidence that on the very day on which the Colonel at Michele’s with one of the alleged children, it was proved that a “foreign gentleman,” exactly answering his description, had purchased, for three gold louis, a fortnight-old baby from its peasant-parents, called Mignon, in a Paris slum?

To add further to the confusion, both Colonel Stewart and Mrs Hewit, in later years, declared in the most positive manner, first that the children had been born at Michele’s, and secondly at Madame la Brune’s, in defiance of the facts that on the 10th of July, the alleged date of birth, the mother was beyond any doubt staying at Godefroi’s hotel, that no such person as Madame la Brune apparently existed, and that the only visible child at Michele’s was a fortnight old.