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‘Good heaven!’ cried the horrified Anastasie. ‘Henri, how can you?’

‘My cherished one, this is a process of induction,’ said the Doctor. ‘If any of my steps are unsound, correct me. You are silent? Then do not, I beseech you, be so vulgarly illogical as to revolt from my conclusion. We have now arrived,’ he resumed, ‘at some idea of the composition of the gang–for I incline to the hypothesis of more than one–and we now leave this room, which can disclose no more, and turn our attention to the court and garden. (Jean-Marie, I trust you are observantly following my various steps; this is an excellent piece of education for you.) Come with me to the door. No steps on the court; it is unfortunate our court should be paved. On what small matters hang the destiny of these delicate investigations! Hey! What have we here? I have led on to the very spot,’ he said, standing grandly backward and indicating the green gate. ‘An escalade, as you can now see for yourselves, has taken place.’

Sure enough, the green paint was in several places scratched and broken; and one of the panels preserved the print of a nailed shoe. The foot had slipped, however, and it was difficult to estimate the size of the shoe, and impossible to distinguish the pattern of the nails.

‘The whole robbery,’ concluded the Doctor, ‘step by step, has been reconstituted. Inductive science can no further go.’

‘It is wonderful,’ said his wife. ‘You should indeed have been a detective, Henri. I had no idea of your talents.’

‘My dear,’ replied Desprez, condescendingly, ‘a man of scientific imagination combines the lesser faculties; he is a detective just as he is a publicist or a general; these are but local applications of his special talent. But now,’ he continued, ‘would you have me go further? Would you have me lay my finger on the culprits–or rather, for I cannot promise quite so much, point out to you the very house where they consort? It may be a satisfaction, at least it is all we are likely to get, since we are denied the remedy of law. I reach the further stage in this way. In order to fill my outline of the robbery, I require a man likely to be in the forest idling, I require a man of education, I require a man superior to considerations of morality. The three requisites all centre in Tentaillon’s boarders. They are painters, therefore they are continually lounging in the forest. They are painters, therefore they are not unlikely to have some smattering of education. Lastly, because they are painters, they are probably immoral. And this I prove in two ways. First, painting is an art which merely addresses the eye; it does not in any particular exercise the moral sense. And second, painting, in common with all the other arts, implies the dangerous quality of imagination. A man of imagination is never moral; he outsoars literal demarcations and reviews life under too many shifting lights to rest content with the invidious distinctions of the law!’

‘But you always say–at least, so I understood you’–said madame, ‘that these lads display no imagination whatever.’

‘My dear, they displayed imagination, and of a very fantastic order, too,’ returned the Doctor, ‘when they embraced their beggarly profession. Besides–and this is an argument exactly suited to your intellectual level–many of them are English and American. Where else should we expect to find a thief?–And now you had better get your coffee. Because we have lost a treasure, there is no reason for starving. For my part, I shall break my fast with white wine. I feel unaccountably heated and thirsty to-day. I can only attribute it to the shock of the discovery. And yet, you will bear me out, I supported the emotion nobly.’

The Doctor had now talked himself back into an admirable humour; and as he sat in the arbour and slowly imbibed a large allowance of white wine and picked a little bread and cheese with no very impetuous appetite, if a third of his meditations ran upon the missing treasure, the other two- thirds were more pleasingly busied in the retrospect of his detective skill.