"Mr. Timmins is a man of four or five and twenty, with a fair but somewhat freckled face, straw-coloured hair, and weak eyes. By the time I had been ten minutes in his company I had discovered him to be one of that numerous class of young men who have a very excellent opinion of themselves and their abilities, without having anything to offer the world in justification thereof. "The first thing I did was to hand him my card. "'To what may I attribute the honour of this visit, Mr. Winslade?' he asked, as, after glancing at the card, he laid it on the table. "'I am given to understand by the editor of _The Family Cornucopia_ that you are the author of a story entitled "How, and Why" which appeared in a recent number of that magazine. May I assume, Mr. Timmins, that such is the fact?' "He changed colour and hesitated for a second or two before answering. Then he said: 'Really, Mr. Winslade, I am at a loss to imagine how it can possibly matter to you whether I am, or am not, the author of the story in question. Still, if, as you state, Mr. Philpot has seen fit to acknowledge the fact, I am not going to run counter to his statement.' "'Thank you for your frankness, Mr. Timmins,' I replied, as I drew my chair a little closer to the table which divided us. 'You may take it for granted that the information I am here to seek at your hands has not for its object the satisfaction of an idle curiosity; very far indeed is that from being the case. What I should like you to tell me first of all is, whence and how you obtained the information, in other words, the basis of fact, on which your story is built up.' "As before, there was the same hesitation prior to answering. Then he said: 'I fail to understand why you should assume that my story has any, even the slightest substratum of fact, or that it is anything more than a specimen of purely imaginative writing.' "'That is a point as to which I can speedily enlighten you,' was my reply. "Thereupon I entered into the reasons, one by one, which had sufficed to convince me that, whoever the writer of the story might be, he was someone who had not merely a suspiciously intimate knowledge of all the details of the Loudwater Tragedy, but one who professed to account for the crime after a fashion so startling and original that I, as a person connected to some extent with the case, felt bound to ascertain what amount of truth, if any, underlaid his statements.