The leader-writers on the popular journals took up the idea. They depicted the whole scene as vividly as if it had been shown to them in a charmed sleep. They gushed as they described the beauty of the wife; they wept as they told of her intemperate habits. The husband they painted in the darkest dyes of iniquity. A man who had battened on his wife’s earnings--a poor creature--a led captain--idle, luxurious, intemperate, since it was doubtless his example which had taught that glorious creature to drink. They painted, in a blaze of lurid light, the scene of the murder. The husband’s midnight return from haunts of vice--the wife’s recriminations--her natural outbreak of jealousy--hot words on both sides. The husband brutalized by drink, stung to fury by the wife’s well-merited reproaches, snatches the dagger from the table where he had lately flung it after a desultory half-hour of labour, and plunges the blade into his wife’s bosom. The leader-writer saw the whole thing, as in a picture. The public read, and at street corners and on the roofs of omnibuses the public talk for the next three weeks was of Jack Chicot’s crime, and the miserable stupidity of the police in not being able to find him. * * * * * Between eight and nine o’clock on the night after La Chicot’s funeral an elderly man called upon Mr. Mosheh, a diamond merchant in a small way, who lived in one of the streets near Brunswick Square. The gentleman was respectably clad in a long overcoat, and wore a grey beard which had been allowed to grow with a luxuriance that entirely concealed the lower part of his face. Under his soft felt hat he wore a black velvet skull-cap, below which there appeared no vestige of hair; whereby it might be inferred that the velvet cap was intended to hide the baldness of the skull it covered. Under the rim of the cap, which was drawn low upon the brow, appeared a pair of shaggy grey eyebrows, shadowing prominent eyes. Mr. Mosheh came out of his dining-room, whence the savoury odour of fish fried in purest olive oil followed him like a kind of incense, and found the stranger waiting for him in the front room, which was half parlour, half office. The diamond merchant had a sharp eye for character, and he saw at a glance that his visitor belonged to the hawk rather than to the pigeon family. ‘Wants to do me if he can,’ he said to himself. ‘What can I do for you?’ he asked, with oily affability. ‘You buy diamonds, I want to sell some; and as I sell them under the pressure of peculiar circumstances I am prepared to let you have them a bargain,’ said the stranger, with a tone at once friendly and business-like. ‘I don’t believe in bargains. I’ll give you a fair price for a good article, if you came by the things honestly,’ replied Mr. Mosheh, with a suspicious look. ‘I am not a receiver of stolen goods. You have come to the wrong shop for that.’