band
has never been celebrated or successful; and it is the solemn truth that
he has never dreamed of being so. He no more expects to be famous for
thinking than for smoking cigars. On all that side he has a sort of
splendid stupidity. He has never grown up. He still liked Champion
exactly as he liked him at school; he admired him as he would admire
a conjuring trick done at the dinner-table. But he couldn't be got
to conceive the notion of envying Champion. And Champion wanted to be
envied. He went mad and killed himself for that."

"Yes," said Father Brown; "I think I begin to understand."

"Oh, don't you see?" she cried; "the whole picture is made for that--the
place is planned for it. Champion put John in a little house at his very
door, like a dependant--to make him feel a failure. He never felt it.
He thinks no more about such things than--than an absent-minded lion.
Champion would burst in on John's shabbiest hours or homeliest meals
with some dazzling present or announcement or expedition that made it
like the visit of Haroun Alraschid, and John would accept or refuse
amiably with one eye off, so to speak, like one lazy schoolboy agreeing
or disagreeing with another. After five years of it John had not turned
a hair; and Sir Claude Champion was a monomaniac."

"And Haman began to tell them," said Father Brown, "of all the things
wherein the king had honoured him; and he said: 'All these things profit
me nothing while I see Mordecai the Jew sitting in the gate.'"

"The crisis came," Mrs Boulnois continued, "when I persuaded John to let
me take down some of his speculations and send them to a magazine. They
began to attract attention, especially in America, and one paper wanted
to interview him. When Champion (who was interviewed nearly every day)
heard of this late little crumb of success falling to his unconscious
rival, the last link snapped that held back his devilish hatred. Then he
began to lay that insane siege to my own love and honour which has been
the talk of the shire. You will ask me why I allowed such atrocious
attentions. I answer that I could not have declined them except by
explaining to my husband, and there are some things the soul cannot
do, as the body cannot fly. Nobody could have explained to my husband.
Nobody could do it now. If you said to him in so many words, 'Champion
is stealing your wife,' he would think the joke a little vulgar: that
it could be anything but a joke--that notion c