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"!

And her own echoing genius swiftly accepted this magnificent
apotheosis of her Cornish husband. I became a new man in her eyes
also. With that marvellous power of make-believe, possible only to
women of supreme genius, she swiftly con