"'No, sir, that certainly was not the man.' "'You are quite sure?' asked the magistrate in amazement, while the crowd literally gasped with wonder. "'I swear it,' asserted Mr. Morton. "'Can you describe the man who assaulted you?' "'Certainly. He was dark, of swarthy complexion, tall, thin, with bushy eyebrows and thick black hair and short beard. He spoke English with just the faintest suspicion of a foreign accent.' "The prisoner, as I told you before, was English in every feature. English in his ruddy complexion, and absolutely English in his speech. "After that the case for the prosecution began to collapse. Every one had expected a sensational defence, and Mr. Matthew Quiller, counsel for Skinner, fully justified all these expectations. He had no fewer than four witnesses present who swore positively that at 9.45 a.m. on the morning of Wednesday, March 17th, the prisoner was in the express train leaving Brighton for Victoria. "Not being endowed with the gift of being in two places at once, and Mr. Morton having added the whole weight of his own evidence in Mr. Edward Skinner's favour, that gentleman was once more remanded by the magistrate, pending further investigation by the police, bail being allowed this time in two sureties of £50 each." CHAPTER XXVII TWO BLACKGUARDS "Tell me what you think of it," said the man in the corner, seeing that Polly remained silent and puzzled. "Well," she replied dubiously, "I suppose that the so-called Armand de la Tremouille's story was true in substance. That he did not perish on the _Argentina_, but drifted home, and blackmailed his former wife." "Doesn't it strike you that there are at least two very strong points against that theory?" he asked, making two gigantic knots in his piece of string. "Two?" "Yes. In the first place, if the blackmailer was the 'Comte de la Tremouille' returned to life, why should he have been content to take £10,000 from a lady who was his lawful wife, and who could keep him in luxury for the rest of his natural life upon her large fortune, which was close upon a quarter of a million? The real Comte de la Tremouille, remember, had never found it difficult to get money out of his wife during their brief married life, whatever Mr. Morton's subsequent experience in the same direction might have been. And, secondly, why should he have typewritten his letters to his wife?" "Because--" "That was a point which, to my mind, the police never made the most of. Now, my experience in criminal cases has invariably been that when a typewritten letter figures in one, that letter is a forgery. It is not very difficult to imitate a signature, but it is a jolly sight more difficult to imitate a handwriting throughout an entire letter." "Then, do you think--"