The chief difficulty in accepting the fact has always been that, in designs on the covers, by Mr. C. A. Collins, first husband of Mrs. Perugini, we see a young man, who is undeniably Edwin Drood, confronting Jasper in a dark vault, in the full light of a lantern held up by Jasper. Mrs. Perugini says that this figure may be regarded as ‘the ghost of Edwin as seen by Jasper in his half-dazed and drugged condition,’ or Helena Landless ‘dressed as Datchery.’ The figure is not dressed as Datchery, nor was Miss Landless fair like Drood, but very dark. As for the ghost, he is as substantial as Jasper, and it is most improbable that Dickens would have a mere hallucination designed in such a substantial fashion, ‘massive and concrete,’ as Pip said of Mr. Wopsle’s rendering of the part of Hamlet. Mr. Lang in his final _Blackwood_ paper repeats the assertion with unhesitating confidence. He goes so far as to say: Last, Dickens had instructed his son-in-law, Charles Collins (brother of Wilkie Collins), to design a pictorial cover of the numbers, in which Jasper, entering a dark vault with a lantern, finds a substantial shadow-casting Drood ‘in his habit as he lived,’—soft conical hat and all,—confronting him. As to this we note: 1. That Collins received no such instructions. 2. That neither Collins nor Luke Fildes nor any of the Dickens family read the illustration in that sense. They all supposed Edwin to be dead. 3. We also note that, in spite of Mr. Lang’s confident assertions, there is no unanimity as to the meaning of the design. It may be Drood; it may be, as I think it is, Datchery; it may be Neville Landless, as Mr. Hugh Thomson has suggested. But no one is entitled to dogmatise on the subject. 4. As I have already pointed out, in the great majority of the wrappers the designs are vague and general, and cannot be verified in the narrative. 5. But to my mind the most conclusive proof that the wrapper is not to be rigidly and pedantically interpreted is that Dickens himself was the very last man in the world to give away his secrets on the cover. On this Madame Perugini has said all that needs to be said. I am glad to find that in his last review of the controversy Dr. M. R. James makes no mention of the wrapper evidence. ‘WHEN SHALL THESE THREE MEET AGAIN?’