appear to us as they appear to strangers?  Do our rooms, our furniture, our pipes strike our eye as they would strike the eye of an outsider, looking on them for the first time?  Can a mother see her babe’s ugliness, or a lover his mistress’s shortcomings, though they stare everybody else in the face?  Can we see ourselves as others see us?  No; habit, prepossession changes all.  The mind is a large factor of every so-called external fact.  The eye sees, sometimes, what it wishes to see, more often what it expects to see.  You follow me, sir?”

The Home Secretary nodded his head less impatiently.  He was beginning to be interested.  The hubbub from without broke faintly upon their ears.

“To give you a definite example.  Mr. Wimp says that when I burst open the door of Mr. Constant’s room on the morning of December 4th, and saw that the staple of the bolt had been wrested by the pin from the lintel, I jumped at once to the conclusion that I had broken the bolt.  Now I admit that this was so, only in things like this you do not seem to conclude, you jump so fast that you see, or seem to.  On the other hand, when you see a standing ring of fire produced by whirling a burning stick, you do not believe in its continuous existence.  It is the same when witnessing a legerdemain performance.  Seeing is not always believing, despite the proverb; but believing is often seeing.  It is not to the point that in that little matter of the door Wimp was as hopelessly and incurably wrong as he has been in everything all along.  The door was securely bolted.  Still I confess that I should have seen that I had broken the bolt in forcing the door, even if it had been broken beforehand.  Never once since December 4th did this possibility occur to me, till Wimp with perverted ingenuity suggested it.  If this is the case with a trained observer, one moreover fully conscious of this ineradicable tendency of the human mind, how must it be with an untrained observer?”

“Come to the point, come to the point,” said the Home Secretary, putting out his hand as if it itched to touch the bell on the writing-table.

“Such as,” went on Grodman, imperturbably, “such as—­Mrs. Drabdump.  That worthy person is unable, by repeated violent knocking, to arouse her lodger who yet desires to be aroused; she becomes alarmed, she rushes across to get my assistance; I burst open the door—­what do you think the good lady expected to see?”

“Mr. Constant murdered, I suppose,” murmured the Home Secretary, wonderingly.

“Exactly.  And so she saw it.  And what should you think was the condition of Arthur Constant when the door yielded to my violent exertions and flew open?”

“Why, was he not dead?” gasped the Home Secretary, his heart fluttering violently.

“Dead?  A young, healthy fellow like that!  When the door flew open, Arthur Constant was sleeping the sleep of the just.  It was a deep, a very deep sleep, of course, else the blows at his door would long since have awakened him.  But all the while Mrs. Drabdump’s fancy was picturing her lodger cold and stark, the poor young fellow was lying in bed in a nice warm sleep.”