"Good, so far."
"And she is firmly persuaded that you will bring the truth to light. She still clings to her dream, you know."
"Does she talk about Humphrey? Was she taken with him?"
"She says little. She lies down and shuts her eyes. Then she is thinking of him. She likes me to play, so that she may think about him. When we drive out, I am sure she is looking for him in the crowd. If he were to call, she would tell him everything. And I am certain that she dreams of heaping upon him all that a young man can possibly desire as soon as she gets him back."
"I hope the poor soul will not meet with disappointment. But I fear, Molly—I fear." He relapsed into his gloomy silence. "I hold the two ends of the chain in my hands, but I cannot connect the ends. I might go to Steele and show him what I suspect. He would only laugh at me. He laughs like the Sphynx, sometimes. If I went to Lady Woodroffe, I should be handed over to her solicitors, and by them conducted to the High Court of Justice; I should hear plain speaking from the Judge on the subject of defamation of character. Everybody would believe that I was a black-mailer. I should be called upon to pay large sums of money as damages; and I should have to go through the Court of Bankruptcy."
The mind of this inquirer had never before been exercised upon any matter more knotty than the presentation of a simple plot, or the difficulty of getting people off the stage. Sometimes, in moments of depression, he even doubted his own conclusions—a condition of mind fatal to all discovery, because it is quite certain that the eye of faith first perceives what the slow piecing together of facts afterwards proves. You must perceive the truth, somehow, first before you can prove it. Perhaps it is not the truth which is at first discerned. In that case, the seeker after truth has at least an imaginary object by which to direct his steps. It may lead him wrong; on the other hand, it may help him to recover the clue which will lead him straight to the heart of things. In a word, one wants a theory to assist all research in things of science or in things of practice.
"Dick," said Molly, "about those registers."
"What about them?"
"Why, that the doctor might have found the name of the child by simply looking into the registers."
"If the child, that is to say, died in Birmingham."