" he murmured. "The best of fellows. And a terribly
acute fellow. Dear me! How curious it all is!"

CHAPTER III

HANDCUFFS IN THE AIR

A painter and the son of a painter, Philip Trent had, while yet in his
twenties, achieved some reputation within the world of English art.
Moreover, his pictures sold. An original, forcible talent and a habit of
leisurely but continuous working, broken by fits of strong creative
enthusiasm, were at the bottom of it. His father's name had helped; a
patrimony large enough to relieve him of the perilous imputation of
being a struggling man had certainly not hindered. But his best aid to
success had been an unconscious power of getting himself liked. Good
spirits and a lively, humorous fancy will always be popular. Trent
joined to these a genuine interest in others that gained him something
deeper than popularity. His judgment of persons was penetrating, but its
process was internal; no one felt on good behavior with a man who seemed
always to be enjoying himself. Whether he was in a mood for floods of
nonsense or applying himself vigorously to a task, his face seldom lost
its expression of contained vivacity. Apart from a sound knowledge of
his art and its history, his culture was large and loose, dominated by a
love of poetry. At thirty-two he had not yet passed the age of laughter
and adventure.

His rise to a celebrity a hundred times greater than his proper work had
won for him came of a momentary impulse. One day he had taken up a
newspaper to find it chiefly concerned with a crime of a sort curiously
rare in our country: a murder done in a railway train. The circumstances
were puzzling; two persons were under arrest upon suspicion. Trent, to
whom an interest in such affairs was a new sensation, heard the thing
discussed among his friends, and set himself in a purposeless mood to
read up the accounts given in several journals. He became intrigued; his
imagination began to work, in a manner strange to him, upon facts; an
excitement took hold of him such as he had only known before in his
bursts of art-inspiration or of personal adventure. At the end of the
day he wrote and despatched a long letter to the editor of the _Record_,
which he chose only because it had contained the fullest and most
intelligent version of the facts.

In this letter he did very much what Poe had done in the case of the
murder of Mary Rogers. With nothing but the newspapers to guide him, he
drew at