It may seem absurd that I should have made so much of the inferences that followed my consideration of this problem, but the truth is that my mind was so intensely occupied with one subject that everything seemed to point to the participation of the important Arthur Banks. At any other time I should not have troubled about the clock; now, I looked to it for evidence. And however ridiculous it may appear, I was influenced in my excited search for clues by the fact that the clock had, after it was re-wound, only struck the hour of twelve. The significance of that deduction lay in the observation--my experience is, admittedly, limited--that clocks which have run down must be patiently made to re-toll the hours they have missed, or they will pick up their last neglected reminders of the time at the point at which they stopped. And from that I inferred an esoteric knowledge of mechanics from that rewinder of the stable-clock who had got the horrid contrivance correctly going again without imposing upon us the misery of slowly working through an almost endless series of, as it were, historical chimes. I agree that my premises were faulty, far too lightly supported, but my mind leapt to the deduction that the mechanic in this connection could be none other than Banks. And granting that, the further inferences were, undoubtedly, important. For as I saw them they pointed infallibly to the conclusion that Banks had accepted once more the yoke of servitude; that he had made his exit through the servants' quarters and had meekly taken up his tasks again with the winding of the stable-clock. (I may add that strangely enough the weak inference was correct, and the well-grounded one fallacious. If you would interpret the riddle of human motives, put no confidence in logic. The principles of logic are founded on the psychology of Anyone. And Anyone is a mechanical waxwork, an intellectual abstraction, a thing without a soul or a sub-consciousness.) Having taken the side of old Jervaise, I ought to have been comforted by this conclusion, and I tried to persuade myself that it indicated the only satisfactory termination to the brief drama of the night. I attempted to see the affair as a slightly ridiculous episode that had occupied exactly twelve hours and ended with an inevitable bathos. I pictured the return of a disgraced and penitent Brenda, and the temporary re-employment, as an antidote to gossip, of the defeated Banks. They would be parted, of course. She might be taken abroad, or to Scotland, and by the time she returned, he would have been sent back to the country from which he had been injudiciously recalled. Finally, old Jervaise would be able to take up his life again with his old zest. I believed that he was a man who took his pleasures with a certain gusto. He had been quite gay at the dance before the coming of the scandal that had temporarily upset his peace of mind.