Needless to say that my thoughts were now entirely devoted to my wife and I longed for her first communication.  Our briefest separation caused me pain, for our souls were as one and we had not been parted, save for my visit to Southampton, since our marriage day.

It was her exquisite thought to involve the man from Scotland Yard.  Mark Brendon, then known to be taking holiday at Princetown, had been pointed out to her; she appraised him correctly and her woman’s intuition told her what verisimilitude would spring from his active cooperation.  Secure in her own genius, she therefore complicated the issues by appealing to Brendon and winning his enthusiastic assistance.  Much sprang from this, for the poor fellow was soon a willing victim to Jenny; and while he lent a thousand happy touches to subsequent incidents by his inefficiencies and sins of omission, such moderate talent as he possessed was still farther obscured by the emotion of love which sprang up in his heart for my widowed partner.  Thus he became exceedingly useful as time passed; yet fortune favours fools and his very stupidity served him well at the end; for when I sought to destroy him on Griante and believed that I had done so, the man displayed an ingenuity for which I did not give him credit and unconsciously laid the foundations of subsequent disaster.

The letter which Bendigo Redmayne received, and supposed had come from his brother at Plymouth, was posted by Jenny on her journey to “Crow’s Nest.”  We had written it together a week earlier and studied her uncle’s indifferent penmanship very carefully before doing so.  This blind I held valuable, and indeed it proved to be; for it concentrated attention on the port and led to the theory that Robert had escaped to France or Spain.

Thus closed our opening episode.  The murder of Michael Pendean became received as a fact capable of everything but proof absolute, while the escape of Robert Redmayne offered an insoluble problem to the authorities.  Michael Pendean indeed was dead enough, for it had been a part of my original conception that he should never reappear.  Obviously he could not do so; and I, who had already created “Doria,” now began to live my new part in life with zest and gusto—­a dramatist and actor in one.  He did not spring full-fledged from my brain; but like other great impersonators, I gradually enlarged and enriched the character and finally found myself actually living and thinking the new being into which I was translated.  Pendean sank to the shadow of a shade.

My past, by an effort of will, was banished from my mind.  I invented and presently believed in another past.  When my wife returned to my side, I fell in love with her for the second time; and so superbly did I enter into the existence and mental outlook of Giuseppe Doria that I was almost shocked by the familiarity of Jenny when she kissed me and hugged me at the first convenient opportunity after her arrival at “Crow’s Nest”!