If the excellent Betteredge had been present while I was considering that question, and if he had been let into the secret of my thoughts, he would, no doubt, have declared that the German side of me was, on this occasion, my uppermost side.  To speak seriously, it is perhaps possible that my German training was in some degree responsible for the labyrinth of useless speculations in which I now involved myself.  For the greater part of the night, I sat smoking, and building up theories, one more profoundly improbable than another.  When I did get to sleep, my waking fancies pursued me in dreams.  I rose the next morning, with Objective-Subjective and Subjective-Objective inextricably entangled together in my mind; and I began the day which was to witness my next effort at practical action of some kind, by doubting whether I had any sort of right (on purely philosophical grounds) to consider any sort of thing (the Diamond included) as existing at all.

How long I might have remained lost in the mist of my own metaphysics, if I had been left to extricate myself, it is impossible for me to say.  As the event proved, accident came to my rescue, and happily delivered me.  I happened to wear, that morning, the same coat which I had worn on the day of my interview with Rachel.  Searching for something else in one of the pockets, I came upon a crumpled piece of paper, and, taking it out, found Betteredge’s forgotten letter in my hand.

It seemed hard on my good old friend to leave him without a reply.  I went to my writing-table, and read his letter again.

A letter which has nothing of the slightest importance in it, is not always an easy letter to answer.  Betteredge’s present effort at corresponding with me came within this category.  Mr. Candy’s assistant, otherwise Ezra Jennings, had told his master that he had seen me; and Mr. Candy, in his turn, wanted to see me and say something to me, when I was next in the neighbourhood of Frizinghall.  What was to be said in answer to that, which would be worth the paper it was written on?  I sat idly drawing likenesses from memory of Mr. Candy’s remarkable-looking assistant, on the sheet of paper which I had vowed to dedicate to Betteredge—­until it suddenly occurred to me that here was the irrepressible Ezra Jennings getting in my way again!  I threw a dozen portraits, at least, of the man with the piebald hair (the hair in every case, remarkably like), into the waste-paper basket—­and then and there, wrote my answer to Betteredge.  It was a perfectly commonplace letter—­but it had one excellent effect on me.  The effort of writing a few sentences, in plain English, completely cleared my mind of the cloudy nonsense which had filled it since the previous day.

Devoting myself once more to the elucidation of the impenetrable puzzle which my own position presented to me, I now tried to meet the difficulty by investigating it from a plainly practical point of view.  The events of the memorable night being still unintelligible to me, I looked a little farther back, and searched my memory of the earlier hours of the birthday for any incident which might prove of some assistance to me in finding the clue.