He had been looking at the picture for a moment through the magnifying glass, when he suddenly let both fall and jumped up from his seat. He placed one hand over his eyes, and kept it there for some time. Then he let it fall and stared into space, muttering: "What a fool and an idiot I have been! I pretend to be a detective! I am blind—completely blind! I tried to judge others, and yet have not been able to see before my own nose! I am not worth the dust I eat!"
"Hold hard!" I shouted, laughing, "you don't seem to eat much dust; you live plainly, we may say, but well. I suppose you mean the dust beneath your feet."
To my astonishment, Monk still remained standing and staring into space, while he repeated:—
"The dust beneath my feet."
I often think of that scene, and how strangely we may act when the brain is really at work. Monk afterward told me that he hadn't the faintest idea what words he had uttered at the time, but that during the few seconds which elapsed, the whole story of the affair which had taken up so many years of his life again passed through his brain—not in its old guise, but in quite a new form; in a new light, which helped him to see clearly through the veil of mystery which had hitherto enveloped the thing.
But suffice it to say that Monk soon became himself again, or, better still, an improved edition of the depressed and resigned man we had seen for the last few days. His eyes sparkled and his lips trembled with joyous emotion, as he stood before Clara and me, and alternately shook our hands.
"All is clear now! I can prove that Sigrid is innocent. It is as clear as the day; and I can also prove who the scoundrel is"—here a dark shadow overspread his face—"who is the author of all this wretched treachery."
"But how?"
"It is soon explained," answered Monk. "Tell me, why was it that Evelina was acquitted? Because it was proved that she could not be the person who appeared in the photograph—do you remember?"
"Yes, of course! First of all, because the person in the photograph has a ring on the third finger of the left hand, while Evelina, on account of an injury to her finger when a child, could not get a ring on this finger."