matter of fact, I don't; only I rather understood that that was
your own belief."

"You understood! Now from whom did you 'understand' that? From
Godfrey Bellingham? H'm! And how did he know what I believe? I never
told him. It is a very unsafe thing, my dear sir, to expound another
man's beliefs."

"Then you think that John Bellingham is alive?"

"Do I? Who said so? I did not, you know."

"But he must be either dead or alive."

"There," said Mr. Jellicoe, "I am entirely with you. You have stated
an undeniable truth."

"It is not a very illuminating one, however," I replied, laughing.

"Undeniable truths often are not," he retorted. "They are apt to be
extremely general. In fact, I would affirm that the certainty of the
truth of a given proposition is directly proportional to its
generality."

"I suppose that is so," said I.

"Undoubtedly. Take an instance from your own profession. Given a
million normal human beings under twenty, and you can say with
certainty that a majority of them will die before reaching a certain
age, that they will die in certain circumstances and of certain
diseases. Then take a single unit from that million, and what can you
predict concerning him? Nothing. He may die to-morrow; he may live to
be a couple of hundred. He may die of a cold in the head or a cut
finger, or from falling off the cross of St. Paul's. In a particular
case you can predict nothing."

"That is perfectly true," said I. And then realizing that I had been
led away from the topic of John Bellingham, I ventured to return to it.

"That was a very mysterious affair--the disappearance of John
Bellingham, I mean."

"Why mysterious?" asked Mr. Jellicoe. "Men disappear from time to
time, and when they reappear, the explanations that they give (when
they give any) seem more or less adequate."

"But the circumstances were surely rather mysterious."

"What circumstances?" asked Mr. Jellicoe.

"I mean the way in which he vanished from Mr. Hurst's house."

"In what way did he vanish from it?"

"Well, of course, I don't know."

"Precisely. Neither do I. Therefore I can't say whether that way was
a mysterious one or not."

"It is not even certain that he did leave it," I remarked, rather
recklessly.

"Exactly," said Mr. Jellicoe. "And if he did not, he is there still.
And if he is there still, he has not disappeared--in the sense
understood. And if he has not disappeared, there is no myste