beautiful crime I ever committed," Flambeau would say in his
highly moral old age, "was also, by a singular coincidence, my last.
It was committed at Christmas. As an artist I had always attempted to
provide crimes suitable to the special season or landscapes in which I
found myself, choosing this or that terrace or garden for a catastrophe,
as if for a statuary group. Thus squires should be swindled in long
rooms panelled with oak; while Jews, on the other hand, should rather
find themselves unexpectedly penniless among the lights and screens of
the Cafe Riche. Thus, in England, if I wished to relieve a dean of his
riches (which is not so easy as you might suppose), I wished to frame
him, if I make myself clear, in the green lawns and grey towers of some
cathedral town. Similarly, in France, when I had got money out of a rich
and wicked peasant (which is almost impossible), it gratified me to get
his indignant head relieved against a grey line of clipped poplars,
and those solemn plains of Gaul over which broods the mighty spirit of
Millet.

"Well, my last crime was a Christmas crime, a cheery, cosy, English
middle-class crime; a crime of Charles Dickens. I did it in a good old
middle-class house near Putney, a house with a crescent of carriage
drive, a house with a stable by the side of it, a house with the name
on the two outer gates, a house with a monkey tree. Enough, you know the
species. I really think my imitation of Dickens's style was dexterous
and literary. It seems almost a pity I repented the same evening."

Flambeau would then proceed to tell the story from the inside; and
even from the inside it was odd. Seen from the outside it was perfectly
incomprehensible, and it is from the outside that the stranger must
study it. From this standpoint the drama may be said to have begun when
the front doors of the house with the stable opened on the garden with
the monkey tree, and a young girl came out with bread to feed the birds
on the afternoon of Boxing Day. She had a pretty face, with brave brown
eyes; but her figure was beyond conjecture, for she was so wrapped up in
brown furs that it was hard to say which was hair and which was fur. But
for the attractive face she might have been a small toddling bear.

The winter afternoon was reddening towards evening, and already a ruby
light was rolled over the bloomless beds, filling them, as it were, with
the ghosts of the dead roses. On one side of the house stood t