“I think I can explain to the young lady,” said Dr. Cyrus Pym.  “This criminal or maniac Smith is a very genius of evil, and has a method of his own, a method of the most daring ingenuity.  He is popular wherever he goes, for he invades every house as an uproarious child.  People are getting suspicious of all the respectable disguises for a scoundrel; so he always uses the disguise of—­what shall I say—­the Bohemian, the blameless Bohemian.  He always carries people off their feet.  People are used to the mask of conventional good conduct.  He goes in for eccentric good-nature.  You expect a Don Juan to dress up as a solemn and solid Spanish merchant; but you’re not prepared when he dresses up as Don Quixote.  You expect a humbug to behave like Sir Charles Grandison; because (with all respect, Miss Hunt, for the deep, tear-moving tenderness of Samuel Richardson) Sir Charles Grandison so often behaved like a humbug.  But no real red-blooded citizen is quite ready for a humbug that models himself not on Sir Charles Grandison but on Sir Roger de Coverly.  Setting up to be a good man a little cracked is a new criminal incognito, Miss Hunt.  It’s been a great notion, and uncommonly successful; but its success just makes it mighty cruel.  I can forgive Dick Turpin if he impersonates Dr. Busby; I can’t forgive him when he impersonates Dr. Johnson.  The saint with a tile loose is a bit too sacred, I guess, to be parodied.”

“But how do you know,” cried Rosamund desperately, “that Mr. Smith is a known criminal?”

“I collated all the documents,” said the American, “when my friend Warner knocked me up on receipt of your cable.  It is my professional affair to know these facts, Miss Hunt; and there’s no more doubt about them than about the Bradshaw down at the depot.  This man has hitherto escaped the law, through his admirable affectations of infancy or insanity.  But I myself, as a specialist, have privately authenticated notes of some eighteen or twenty crimes attempted or achieved in this manner.  He comes to houses as he has to this, and gets a grand popularity.  He makes things go.  They do go; when he’s gone the things are gone.  Gone, Miss Hunt, gone, a man’s life or a man’s spoons, or more often a woman.  I assure you I have all the memoranda.”

“I have seen them,” said Warner solidly, “I can assure you that all this is correct.”

“The most unmanly aspect, according to my feelings,” went on the American doctor, “is this perpetual deception of innocent women by a wild simulation of innocence.  From almost every house where this great imaginative devil has been, he has taken some poor girl away with him; some say he’s got a hypnotic eye with his other queer features, and that they go like automata.  What’s become of all those poor girls nobody knows.  Murdered, I dare say; for we’ve lots of instances, besides this one, of his turning his hand to murder, though none ever brought him under the law.  Anyhow, our most modern methods of research can’t find any trace of the wretched women.  It’s when I think of them that I am really moved, Miss Hunt.  And I’ve really nothing else to say just now except what Dr. Warner has said.”