it is perhaps possible that my German training
was in some degree responsible for the labyrinth
of useless speculations in which I now involved
myself. For the greater part of the night, I sat
smoking, and building up theories, one more
profoundly improbable than another. When I
did get to sleep, my waking fancies pursued me
in dreams. I rose the next morning, with
Objective-Subjective and Subjective-Objective
inextricably entangled together in my mind; and
I began the day which was to witness my next
effort at practical action of some kind, by doubting
whether I had any sort of right (on purely
philosophical grounds) to consider any sort of
thing (the Diamond included) as existing at all.

How long I might have remained lost in the
mist of my own metaphysics, if I had been left
to extricate myself, it is impossible for me to say.
As the event proved, accident came to my rescue,
and happily delivered me. I happened to wear,
that morning, the same coat which I had worn
on the day of my interview with Rachel.
Searching for something else in one of the
pockets, I came upon a crumpled piece of paper,
and, taking it out, found Betteredge's forgotten
letter in my hand.

It seemed hard on my good old friend to
leave him without a reply. I went to my
writing-table, and read his letter again.

A letter which has nothing of the slightest
importance in it, is not always an easy letter to
answer. Betteredge's present effort at
corresponding with me came within this category.
Mr. Candy's assistant, otherwise Ezra Jennings,
had told his master that he had seen me; and
Mr. Candy, in his turn, wanted to see me and
say something to me, when I was next in the
neighbourhood of Frizinghall. What was to be
said in answer to that, which would be worth
the paper it was written on? I sat idly drawing
likenesses from memory of Mr. Candy's
remarkable-looking assistant, on the sheet of
paper which I had vowed to dedicate to
Betteredge—until it suddenly occurred to me that
here was the irrepressible Ezra Jennings getting
in my way again! I threw a dozen portraits,
at least, of the man with the piebald hair (the
hair in every case, remarkably like), into the
waste-paper basket—and then and there, wrote
my answer to Betteredge. It was a perfectly
common-place letter—but it had one excellent
effect on me. The effort of writing a few
sentences, in plain English, completely cleared my
mind of the cloudy nonsense which had filled it
since the previous day.

Devoting myself once more to the elucidation
of the impenetrable puzzle which my own
position presented to me, I now tried to meet the
difficulty by investigating it from a plainly
practical point of view. The events of the
memorable night being still unintelligible to me, I
looked a little farther back, and searched my
memory of the earlier hours of the birthday
for any incident—which might prove of some
assistance to me in finding the clue.

Had anything happened while Rachel and I
were finishing the painted door? or, later, when
I rode over to Frizinghall? or afterwards, when
I went back with Godfrey Ablewhite and his
sisters? or, later again, when I put the
Moonstone into Rachel's hands? or, later still, when
the company came, and we all assembled round
the dinner-table? My memory disposed of that
string of questions readily enough, until I came
to the last. Looking back at the social events
of the birthday dinner, I found myself brought
to a standstill at the outset of the inquiry. I
was not even capable of accurately remembering
the number of the guests who had sat at the
same table with me.

To feel myself completely at fault here, and
to conclude, thereupon, that the incidents of
the dinner might especially repay the trouble
of investigating them, formed parts of the same
mental process, in my case. I believe other
people, in a similar situation, would have
reasoned as I did. When the pursuit of our own
interests causes us to become objects of inquiry
to ourselves, we are naturally suspicious of what
we don't know. Once in possession of the
names of the persons who had been present at
the dinner, I resolved—as a means of enriching
the deficient resources of my own memory—to
appeal to the memories of the rest of the guests;
to write down all that they could recollect of
the social events of the birthday; and to test
the result, thus obtained, by the light of what
had happened afterwards when the company
had left the house.

This last and newest of my many
contemplated experiments in the art of inquiry—
which Betteredge would probably have attributed
to the clear-headed, or French, side of me
being uppermost for the moment—may fairly
claim record here, on its own merits. Unlikely
as it may seem, I had now actually groped
my way to the root of the matter at last.
All I wanted was a hint to guide me in the
right direction at starting. Before another
day had passed over my head, that hint was
given me by one of the company who had been
present at the birthday feast!

With the plan of proceeding which I now had
in view, it was first necessary to possess the
complete list of the guests. This I could easily obtain
from Gabriel Betteredge. I determined to go
back to Yorkshire on that day, and to begin my
contemplated investigation the next morning.

It was just too late to start by the train which
left London before noon. There was no
alternative but to wait, nearly three hours, for the
departure of the next train. Was there
anything I could do in London, which might
fully occupy this interval of time?

My thoughts went back again obstinately to
the birthday dinner.

Though I had forgotten the numbers, and, in
many cases, the names of the guests, I
remembered readily enough that by far the larger
proportion of them came from Frizinghall, or from
its neighbourhood. But the larger proportion
was not all. Some few of us were not regular
residents in the county. I myself was one of
the few. Mr. Murthwaite was another.
Godfrey Ablewhite was a third. Mr. Bruff—no: I