As idle old men must, I lived in the past.  I went over and over again my ancient exploits; I re-read my book.  And as I thought and thought, away from the excitement of the actual hunt, and seeing the facts in a truer perspective, so it grew daily clearer to me that criminals were more fools than rogues.  Every crime I had traced, however cleverly perpetrated, was from the point of view of penetrability a weak failure.  Traces and trails were left on all sides—­ragged edges, rough-hewn corners; in short, the job was botched, artistic completeness unattained.  To the vulgar, my feats might seem marvellous—­the average man is mystified to grasp how you detect the letter ‘e’ in a simple cryptogram—­to myself they were as commonplace as the crimes they unveiled.  To me now, with my lifelong study of the science of evidence, it seemed possible to commit not merely one but a thousand crimes that should be absolutely undiscoverable.  And yet criminals would go on sinning, and giving themselves away, in the same old grooves—­no originality, no dash, no individual insight, no fresh conception!  One would imagine there were an Academy of crime with forty thousand armchairs.  And gradually, as I pondered and brooded over the thought, there came upon me the desire to commit a crime that should baffle detection.  I could invent hundreds of such crimes, and please myself by imagining them done; but would they really work out in practice?  Evidently the sole performer of my experiment must be myself; the subject—­whom or what?  Accident should determine.  I itched to commence with murder—­to tackle the stiffest problems first, and I burned to startle and baffle the world—­especially the world of which I had ceased to be.  Outwardly I was calm, and spoke to the people about me as usual.  Inwardly I was on fire with a consuming scientific passion.  I sported with my pet theories, and fitted them mentally on every one I met.  Every friend or acquaintance I sat and gossiped with, I was plotting how to murder without leaving a clue.  There is not one of my friends or acquaintances I have not done away with in thought.  There is no public man—­have no fear, my dear Home Secretary—­I have not planned to assassinate secretly, mysteriously, unintelligibly, undiscoverably.  Ah, how I could give the stock criminals points—­with their second-hand motives, their conventional conceptions, their commonplace details, their lack of artistic feeling and restraint.”

The crowd had again started cheering.  Impatient as the watchers were, they felt that no news was good news.  The longer the interview accorded by the Home Secretary to the chairman of the Defence Committee, the greater the hope his obduracy was melting.  The idol of the people would be saved, and “Grodman” and “Tom Mortlake” were mingled in the exultant plaudits.