ffort 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 commonplace
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 fin