entiously secure
that he had not missed the criminal so far. He then went to Scotland
Yard to regularise his position and arrange for help in case of need; he
then lit another cigarette and went for a long stroll in the streets of
London. As he was walking in the streets and squares beyond Victoria, he
paused suddenly and stood. It was a quaint, quiet square, very typical
of London, full of an accidental stillness. The tall, flat houses round
looked at once prosperous and uninhabited; the square of shrubbery in
the centre looked as deserted as a green Pacific islet. One of the four
sides was much higher than the rest, like a dais; and the line of this
side was broken by one of London's admirable accidents--a restaurant
that looked as if it had strayed from Soho. It was an unreasonably
attractive object, with dwarf plants in pots and long, striped blinds of
lemon yellow and white. It stood specially high above the street, and in
the usual patchwork way of London, a flight of steps from the street
ran up to meet the front door almost as a fire-escape might run up to
a first-floor window. Valentin stood and smoked in front of the
yellow-white blinds and considered them long.

The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen. A few
clouds in heaven do come together into the staring shape of one human
eye. A tree does stand up in the landscape of a doubtful journey in the
exact and elaborate shape of a note of interrogation. I have seen both
these things myself within the last few days. Nelson does die in the
instant of victory; and a man named Williams does quite accidentally
murder a man named Williamson; it sounds like a sort of infanticide.
In short, there is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people
reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss. As it has been well
expressed in the paradox of Poe, wisdom should reckon on the unforeseen.

Aristide Valentin was unfathomably French; and the French intelligence
is intelligence specially and solely. He was not "a thinking machine";
for that is a brainless phrase of modern fatalism and materialism. A
machine only is a machine because it cannot think. But he was a thinking
man, and a plain man at the same time. All his wonderful successes, that
looked like conjuring, had been gained by plodding logic, by clear
and commonplace French thought. The French electrify the world not by
starting any paradox, they electrify it by carrying out a truism. They
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