niture.

The village in general has never suspected the nephew. Only two people
suspect him: the broken-hearted girl and an old friend of his father.
This gentleman puts a detective on the trail. (The detective is
impersonated by Ralph Lewis.) The gradual breakdown of the victim is
traced by dramatic degrees. This is the second case of the thing I have
argued as being generally impossible in a photoplay chronicle of a
private person, and which the considerations of chapter twelve indicate
as exceptional. We trace the innermost psychology of one special citizen
step by step to the crisis, and that path is actually the primary
interest of the story. The climax is the confession to the detective.
With this self-exposure the direct Poe-quality of the technique comes to
an end. Moreover, Poe would end the story here. But the Poe-dream is set
like a dark jewel in a gold ring, of which more anon.

Let us dwell upon the confession. The first stage of this
conscience-climax is reached by the dramatization of The Tell-tale Heart
reminiscence in the memory of the dreaming man. The episode makes a
singular application of the theories with which this chapter begins. For
furniture-in-motion we have the detective's pencil. For trappings and
inventions in motion we have his tapping shoe and the busy clock
pendulum. Because this scene is so powerful the photoplay is described in
this chapter rather than any other, though the application is more
spiritual than literal. The half-mad boy begins to divulge that he thinks
that the habitual ticking of the clock is satanically timed to the
beating of the dead man's heart. Here more unearthliness hovers round a
pendulum than any merely mechanical trick-movements could impart. Then
the merest commonplace of the detective tapping his pencil in the same
time--the boy trying in vain to ignore it--increases the strain, till the
audience has well-nigh the hallucinations of the victim. Then the bold
tapping of the detective's foot, who would do all his accusing without
saying a word, and the startling coincidence of the owl hoot-hooting
outside the window to the same measure, bring us close to the final
breakdown. These realistic material actors are as potent as the actual
apparitions of the dead man that preceded them. Those visions prepared
the mind to invest trifles with significance. The pencil and the pendulum
conducting themselves in an apparently everyday fashion, satisfy in a far
nobler way t