"But, man alive!" I ejaculated, "that was the tragedy of the whole thing. I remember reading about it at the time. I suppose that it was either out of meanness or because he had so little ready money, but Sir James Narford had only insured his treasure for £20,000, whereas the jewels----" "Were not worth a penny more than that," the Old Man in the Corner broke in with his bland smile. "The public may have been bamboozled with tales of fabulous value--nowadays people talk as glibly of millions as the past generation did of thousands--but insurance companies don't usually listen to fairy tales." "But even so," I argued, "the jewels must have been worth more than the insurance after all the advertisement they got. Why shouldn't Sir James have sold them, rather than take the risk of stealing them?" "But, my dear young lady," he retorted, "can't you see that the jewels can still be sold and that they will be--abroad--presently--one by one? Twenty thousand pounds insurance money is good, but you double the amount and it is better." "But what about the wounded man in Wicklow Lane?" I asked. "A red herring across the trail," he replied, with a smile, "only with this difference, that it was dragged across before the hounds were on the scent. And that is where the immense cleverness of the man comes in. To create a personality on whom to draw suspicion of a crime and then make that personality disappear before the crime is committed, is as clever a bit of rascality as I have ever seen. It needed absolute coolness and a knowledge of facial make-up, in both of which we must take it Sir James Narford was a past-master. Think then how easy everything else would be for him.