was not true that two heads were better than one. As he
crossed the study he almost staggered at a shocking coincidence. Upon
Valentin's table lay the coloured picture of yet a third bleeding head;
and it was the head of Valentin himself. A second glance showed him it
was only a Nationalist paper, called The Guillotine, which every week
showed one of its political opponents with rolling eyes and writhing
features just after execution; for Valentin was an anti-clerical of some
note. But O'Brien was an Irishman, with a kind of chastity even in his
sins; and his gorge rose against that great brutality of the intellect
which belongs only to France. He felt Paris as a whole, from the
grotesques on the Gothic churches to the gross caricatures in the
newspapers. He remembered the gigantic jests of the Revolution. He saw
the whole city as one ugly energy, from the sanguinary sketch lying on
Valentin's table up to where, above a mountain and forest of gargoyles,
the great devil grins on Notre Dame.

The library was long, low, and dark; what light entered it shot from
under low blinds and had still some of the ruddy tinge of morning.
Valentin and his servant Ivan were waiting for them at the upper end of
a long, slightly-sloping desk, on which lay the mortal remains, looking
enormous in the twilight. The big black figure and yellow face of the
man found in the garden confronted them essentially unchanged. The
second head, which had been fished from among the river reeds that
morning, lay streaming and dripping beside it; Valentin's men were still
seeking to recover the rest of this second corpse, which was supposed
to be afloat. Father Brown, who did not seem to share O'Brien's
sensibilities in the least, went up to the second head and examined it
with his blinking care. It was little more than a mop of wet white hair,
fringed with silver fire in the red and level morning light; the face,
which seemed of an ugly, empurpled and perhaps criminal type, had been
much battered against trees or stones as it tossed in the water.

"Good morning, Commandant O'Brien," said Valentin, with quiet
cordiality. "You have heard of Brayne's last experiment in butchery, I
suppose?"

Father Brown was still bending over the head with white hair, and he
said, without looking up:

"I suppose it is quite certain that Brayne cut off this head, too."

"Well, it seems common sense," said Valentin, with his hands in his
pockets. "Killed in the same way