“We agreed that I should drop through the hole into the cave, and make my way through the tunnels, where I often used to play as a boy, to the railway station a few miles from here, and there take a train for London.  It was necessary for the joke, of course, that I should disappear without being traced; so I made my way to a port, and put in a very pleasant month or two round my old haunts in Cyprus and the Mediterranean.  There’s no more to say of that part of the business, except that I arranged to be back by a particular time; and here I am.  But I’ve heard enough of what’s gone on round here to be satisfied that I’ve done the trick.  Everybody in Cornwall and most people in South England have heard of the Vanishing Squire; and thousands of noodles have been nodding their heads over crystals and tarot cards at this marvelous proof of an unseen world.  I reckon the Reappearing Squire will scatter their cards and smash their crystals, so that such rubbish won’t appear again in the twentieth century.  I’ll make the peacock trees the laughing stock of all Europe and America.”

“Well,” said the lawyer, who was the first to rearrange his wits, “I’m sure we’re all only too delighted to see you again, Squire; and I quite understand your explanation and your own very natural motives in the matter.  But I’m afraid I haven’t got the hang of everything yet.  Granted that you wanted to vanish, was it necessary to put bogus bones in the cave, so as nearly to put a halter round the neck of Doctor Brown?  And who put it there?  The statement would appear perfectly maniacal; but so far as I can make head or tail out of anything, Doctor Brown seems to have put it there himself.”

The doctor lifted his head for the first time.

“Yes; I put the bones there,” he said.  “I believe I am the first son of Adam who ever manufactured all the evidence of a murder charge against himself.”

It was the Squire’s turn to look astonished.  The old gentleman looked rather wildly from one to the other.

“Bones!  Murder charge!” he ejaculated.  “What the devil is all this?  Whose bones?”

“Your bones, in a manner of speaking,” delicately conceded the doctor.  “I had to make sure you had really died, and not disappeared by magic.”

The Squire in his turn seemed more hopelessly puzzled than the whole crowd of his friends had been over his own escapade.  “Why not?” he demanded.  “I thought it was the whole point to make it look like magic.  Why did you want me to die so much?”

Doctor Brown had lifted his head; and he now very slowly lifted his hand.  He pointed with outstretched arm at the headland overhanging the foreshore, just above the entrance to the cave.  It was the exact part of the beach where Paynter had first landed, on that spring morning when he had looked up in his first fresh wonder at the peacock trees.  But the trees were gone.

The fact itself was no surprise to them; the clearance had naturally been one of the first of the sweeping changes of the Treherne regime.  But though they knew it well, they had wholly forgotten it; and its significance returned on them suddenly like a sign in heaven.