To say that I laboured at it incessantly, indeed, is to do little justice to actuality. The mystery went with me wherever I turned. I wrestled with it through nights of bitter dreaming; it followed me to the streets, to the theatres, to the houses of my friends. It prevailed above every other occupation; it would start up even in the blue eyes which daily asked the unspoken question; it would envelop little Joan herself as a veil which hid her true self from me; it would stand out black and clear upon every page that I wrote—a sentence irrevocable, a very torture of the doubt. The secret, or the years of darkness, said the voice. I hid myself from the light and still I heard its message. It spoke to me above the city’s clamour and the hum of throngs. The secret, or the night! What an alternative was that! I was to go to Joan and to say to her—You are the daughter of this man or that, but not of General Fordibras. I was to tell her that none of hers had part or lot in the great conspiracy of crime whose fringe I had touched, whose arch-priest I had named. Here was the task in a nutshell, so simple seemingly that any dunce might have entered upon it with confidence or any child sat down to master it. Yet, witness the uncertain steps I had followed, and judge then what kind of a task it was and what the peculiar nature of my difficulties. Judge then if I misrepresent the circumstance or claim for myself that which truth has not justified. We had made a fair passage home from the Azores and come straight to London. Losing none of the precious hours, I went immediately to Scotland Yard, and from Scotland Yard to a friendly Minister’s room at Whitehall, and there I told this story as it is written in this book, and as time has not changed it. If I met with incredulity, I blame no one. My cables home had warned the police of much that I would tell them, and more that remained mere surmise. Murray himself—my old friend Murray, whose suppositions had sent me upon an errand as strange as any in his calendar—Murray assured me that the police of France, of Germany, of America, and of Portugal were already advised of that which had been done, and of the evidence upon which it was being done. But even he had begun to lose faith.