Mr. Proctor writes:—“Creeping down the crypt steps, oppressed by growing horror and by terror of coming judgment, sickening under fears engendered by the darkness of night and the charnel-house air he breathed, Jasper opens the door of the tomb and holds up his lantern, shuddering at the thought of what it may reveal to him. “And what sees he? Is it the spirit of his victim that stands there, ‘in his habit as he lived,’ his hand clasped on his breast, where the ring had been when he was murdered? What else can Jasper deem it? There, clearly visible in the gloom at the back of the tomb, stands Edwin Drood, with stern look fixed on him—pale, silent, relentless!” [Picture: Durdles Cautions Mr. Sapsea against Boasting] Again, “On the title-page are given two of the small pictures from the Love side of the cover, two from the Murder side, and the central picture below, which presents the central horror of the story—the end and aim of the ‘Datchery assumption’ and of Mr. Grewgious’s plans—showing Jasper driven to seek for the proofs of his crime amid the dust to which, as he thought, the flesh and bones, and the very clothes of his victim, had been reduced.” There are only two possible choices; either Collins, under Dickens’s oral instructions, depicted Jasper finding Drood alive in the vault, an incident which was to occur in the story; or Dickens bade Collins do this for the purpose of misleading his readers in an illegitimate manner; while the young man in the vault was really to be some person “made up” to look like Drood, and so to frighten Jasper with a pseudo-ghost of that hero. The latter device, the misleading picture, would be childish, and the pseudo-ghost, exactly like Drood, could not be acted by the gipsy-like, fierce Helena, or by any other person in the romance. MR. WALTERS’S THEORY CONTINUED Mr. Cuming Walters guesses that Jasper was to aim a deadly blow (with his left hand, to judge from the picture) at Helena, and that Neville “was to give his life for hers.” But, manifestly, Neville was to lead the hunt of Jasper up the spiral stair, as in Collins’s design, and was to be dashed from the roof: his body beneath was to be “_that_, I never saw before. _That_ must be real. Look what a poor mean miserable thing it is!” as Jasper says in his vision. Mr. Cuming Walters, pursuing his idea of Helena as both Datchery and also as the owner of “the _young_ face” of the youth in the vault (and also of the young hands, a young girl’s hands could never pass for those of “an elderly buffer”), exclaims: “Imagine the intense power of the dramatic climax, when Datchery, the elderly man, is re-transformed into Helena Landless, the young and handsome woman; and when she reveals the seemingly impenetrable secret which had been closed up in one guilty man’s mind.”