“So far I had got when we went to visit the scene of action.  I surprised you by beating upon the pavement with my stick.  I was ascertaining whether the cellar stretched out in front or behind.  It was not in front.  Then I rang the bell, and, as I hoped, the assistant answered it.  We have had some skirmishes, but we had never set eyes upon each other before.  I hardly looked at his face.  His knees were what I wished to see.  You must yourself have remarked how worn, wrinkled, and stained they were.  They spoke of those hours of burrowing.  The only remaining point was what they were burrowing for.  I walked round the corner, saw the City and Suburban Bank abutted on our friend’s premises, and felt that I had solved my problem.  When you drove home after the concert I called upon Scotland Yard and upon the chairman of the bank directors, with the result that you have seen.”

“And how could you tell that they would make their attempt to-night?” I asked.

“Well, when they closed their League offices that was a sign that they cared no longer about Mr. Jabez Wilson’s presence—­in other words, that they had completed their tunnel.  But it was essential that they should use it soon, as it might be discovered, or the bullion might be removed.  Saturday would suit them better than any other day, as it would give them two days for their escape.  For all these reasons I expected them to come to-night.”

“You reasoned it out beautifully,” I exclaimed in unfeigned admiration.  “It is so long a chain, and yet every link rings true.”

“It saved me from ennui,” he answered, yawning.  “Alas!  I already feel it closing in upon me.  My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence.  These little problems help me to do so.”

“And you are a benefactor of the race,” said I.

He shrugged his shoulders.  “Well, perhaps, after all, it is of some little use,” he remarked. “’L’homme c’est rien—­l’oeuvre c’est tout,’ as Gustave Flaubert wrote to George Sand.”

ADVENTURE III.  A CASE OF IDENTITY

“My dear fellow,” said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, “life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.  We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence.  If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.”

“And yet I am not convinced of it,” I answered.  “The cases which come to light in the papers are, as a rule, bald enough, and vulgar enough.  We have in our police reports realism pushed to its extreme limits, and yet the result is, it must be confessed, neither fascinating nor artistic.”