b.'" He said it with
neither frown nor smile, and his visitor was conscious of a certain deep
and virile indifference in the man which his wife had called greatness.
He laid down a gory yellow "shocker" without even feeling its
incongruity enough to comment on it humorously. John Boulnois was a big,
slow-moving man with a massive head, partly grey and partly bald,
and blunt, burly features. He was in shabby and very old-fashioned
evening-dress, with a narrow triangular opening of shirt-front: he had
assumed it that evening in his original purpose of going to see his wife
act Juliet.

"I won't keep you long from 'The Bloody Thumb' or any other catastrophic
affairs," said Father Brown, smiling. "I only came to ask you about the
crime you committed this evening."

Boulnois looked at him steadily, but a red bar began to show across his
broad brow; and he seemed like one discovering embarrassment for the
first time.

"I know it was a strange crime," assented Brown in a low voice.
"Stranger than murder perhaps--to you. The little sins are sometimes
harder to confess than the big ones--but that's why it's so important to
confess them. Your crime is committed by every fashionable hostess six
times a week: and yet you find it sticks to your tongue like a nameless
atrocity."

"It makes one feel," said the philosopher slowly, "such a damned fool."

"I know," assented the other, "but one often has to choose between
feeling a damned fool and being one."

"I can't analyse myself well," went on Boulnois; "but sitting in that
chair with that story I was as happy as a schoolboy on a half-holiday.
It was security, eternity--I can't convey it... the cigars were within
reach...the matches were within reach... the Thumb had four more
appearances to...it was not only a peace, but a plenitude. Then that
bell rang, and I thought for one long, mortal minute that I couldn't get
out of that chair--literally, physically, muscularly couldn't. Then I
did it like a man lifting the world, because I knew all the servants
were out. I opened the front door, and there was a little man with his
mouth open to speak and his notebook open to write in. I remembered the
Yankee interviewer I had forgotten. His hair was parted in the middle,
and I tell you that murder--"

"I understand," said Father Brown. "I've seen him."

"I didn't commit murder," continued the Catastrophist mildly, "but only
perjury. I said I had gone across to Pendragon Park and shu