is
special talent. But now," he continued, "would you have me go further?
Would you have me lay my finger on the culprits--or rather, for I cannot
promise quite so much, point out to you the very house where they
consort? It may be a satisfaction, at least it is all we are likely to
get, since we are denied the remedy of law. I reach the further stage in
this way. In order to fill my outline of the robbery, I require a man
likely to be in the forest idling, I require a man of education, I
require a man superior to considerations of morality. The three
requisites all centre in Tentaillon's boarders. They are painters,
therefore they are continually lounging in the forest. They are painters,
therefore they are not unlikely to have some smattering of education.
Lastly, because they are painters, they are probably immoral. And this I
prove in two ways. First, painting is an art which merely addresses the
eye; it does not in any particular exercise the moral sense. And second,
painting, in common with all the other arts, implies the dangerous
quality of imagination. A man of imagination is never moral; he outsoars
literal demarcations and reviews life under too many shifting lights to
rest content with the invidious distinctions of the law!"

"But you always say--at least, so I understood you"--said madame, "that
these lads display no imagination whatever."

"My dear, they displayed imagination, and of a very fantastic order too,"
returned the Doctor, "when they embraced their beggarly profession.
Besides--and this is an argument exactly suited to your intellectual
level--many of them are English and American. Where else should we expect
to find a thief?--And now you had better get your coffee. Because we have
lost a treasure, there is no reason for starving. For my part, I shall
break my fast with white wine. I feel unaccountably heated and thirsty
to-day. I can only attribute it to the shock of the discovery. And yet,
you will bear me out, I supported the emotion nobly."

The Doctor had now talked himself back into an admirable humour; and as
he sat in the arbour and slowly imbibed a large allowance of white wine
and picked a little bread and cheese with no very impetuous appetite, if
a third of his meditations ran upon the missing treasure, the other
two-thirds were more pleasingly busied in the retrospect of his detective
skill.

About eleven Casimir arrived; he had caught an early train to
Fontainebleau, and driven