uite by accident some years ago that a number
of people of my acquaintance believed me to have been secretly received
into the Church of Rome. This absurd fiction was based upon the fact,
which in the eyes of many appeared conclusive, that I had expressed
myself in talk as favouring the plan of a weekly abstinence from meat.
Manderson's belief in regard to his secretary probably rested upon a
much slighter ground. It was Mr Bunner, I think you said, who told
you of his rooted and apparently hereditary temper of suspicious
jealousy.... With regard to Marlowe's story, it appeared to me entirely
straightforward, and not, in its essential features, especially
remarkable, once we have admitted, as we surely must, that in the case
of Manderson we have to deal with a more or less disordered mind.'

Trent laughed loudly. 'I confess,' he said, 'that the affair struck me
as a little unusual.

'Only in the development of the details,' argued Mr Cupples. 'What
is there abnormal in the essential facts? A madman conceives a crazy
suspicion; he hatches a cunning plot against his fancied injurer; it
involves his own destruction. Put thus, what is there that any man with
the least knowledge of the ways of lunatics would call remarkable? Turn
now to Marlowe's proceedings. He finds himself in a perilous position
from which, though he is innocent, telling the truth will not save
him. Is that an unheard-of situation? He escapes by means of a bold and
ingenious piece of deception. That seems to me a thing that might happen
every day, and probably does so.' He attacked his now unrecognizable
mutton.

'I should like to know,' said Trent, after an alimentary pause in the
conversation, 'whether there is anything that ever happened on the
face of the earth that you could not represent as quite ordinary and
commonplace by such a line of argument as that.'

A gentle smile illuminated Mr Cupples's face. 'You must not suspect me
of empty paradox,' he said. 'My meaning will become clearer, perhaps, if
I mention some things which do appear to me essentially remarkable.
Let me see .... Well, I would call the life history of the liver-fluke,
which we owe to the researches of Poulton, an essentially remarkable
thing.'

'I am unable to argue the point,' replied Trent. 'Fair science may have
smiled upon the liver-fluke's humble birth, but I never even heard it
mentioned.'

'It is not, perhaps, an appetizing subject,' said Mr Cupples
thoughtfully, 'a