more uproariously
over the broken glass, but the blood on the sword point sent him
into mortal convulsions of amusement. Then he turned to the fuming
specialist.

"Dr Hood," he cried enthusiastically, "you are a great poet! You have
called an uncreated being out of the void. How much more godlike that is
than if you had only ferreted out the mere facts! Indeed, the mere facts
are rather commonplace and comic by comparison."

"I have no notion what you are talking about," said Dr Hood rather
haughtily; "my facts are all inevitable, though necessarily incomplete.
A place may be permitted to intuition, perhaps (or poetry if you prefer
the term), but only because the corresponding details cannot as yet be
ascertained. In the absence of Mr Glass--"

"That's it, that's it," said the little priest, nodding quite eagerly,
"that's the first idea to get fixed; the absence of Mr Glass. He is so
extremely absent. I suppose," he added reflectively, "that there was
never anybody so absent as Mr Glass."

"Do you mean he is absent from the town?" demanded the doctor.

"I mean he is absent from everywhere," answered Father Brown; "he is
absent from the Nature of Things, so to speak."

"Do you seriously mean," said the specialist with a smile, "that there
is no such person?"

The priest made a sign of assent. "It does seem a pity," he said.

Orion Hood broke into a contemptuous laugh. "Well," he said, "before
we go on to the hundred and one other evidences, let us take the first
proof we found; the first fact we fell over when we fell into this room.
If there is no Mr Glass, whose hat is this?"

"It is Mr Todhunter's," replied Father Brown.

"But it doesn't fit him," cried Hood impatiently. "He couldn't possibly
wear it!"

Father Brown shook his head with ineffable mildness. "I never said he
could wear it," he answered. "I said it was his hat. Or, if you insist
on a shade of difference, a hat that is his."

"And what is the shade of difference?" asked the criminologist with a
slight sneer.

"My good sir," cried the mild little man, with his first movement akin
to impatience, "if you will walk down the street to the nearest hatter's
shop, you will see that there is, in common speech, a difference between
a man's hat and the hats that are his."

"But a hatter," protested Hood, "can get money out of his stock of new
hats. What could Todhunter get out of this one old hat?"

"Rabbits," replied Father Brown promptly.

"Wh