"Ah!" he said, with a sigh, "they are the wicked who prosper, and higher justice has apparently forgotten them, as it often does forget the evil-doer, for a time. We must take it that they were well paid for their share in the crime, and, if the unfortunate Charles had lived, he probably would have been blackmailed by them and bled white. As it is, they have gone scot-free. I made a few enquiries in the neighbourhood lately and I discovered that Mr. Triscott is selling his practice and retiring from business. Presently we'll hear that he has bought himself a cottage in the country. Then, perhaps, your last doubt will vanish and you will be ready to admit that I have found the true solution of the mystery that surrounded the death of the miser of Maida Vale." The next moment he was gone, and I just caught sight of the corner of his checked ulster disappearing through the swing doors. XII THE FULTON GARDENS MYSTERY §1 "Are you prepared to admit," the Old Man in the Corner said abruptly as soon as he had finished his glass of milk, "that sympathy, understanding, largeness of heart--what?--are invariably the outcome of a big brain? It is the fool who is censorious and cruel. Your clever man is nearly always sympathetic. He understands, he appreciates, he studies motives and understands them. During the war it was the fools who tracked down innocent men and women under pretence that they were spies; it was the fools who did not understand that a German might be just as fine a patriot as a Briton or a Frenchman if he served his own country. The hard, cruel man is almost always a fool; the backbiting old maid invariably so. "I am tempted to say this," he went on, "because I have been thinking over that curious case which newspaper reporters have called the Fulton Gardens Mystery. You remember it, don't you?" "Yes," I said, "I do. As a matter of fact I knew poor old Mr. Jessup slightly, and I was terribly shocked when I heard about that awful tragedy. And to think that that horrid young Leighton----" "Ha!" my eccentric friend broke in, with a chuckle, "then you have held on to that theory, have you?" "There was no other possible!" I retorted. "But he was discharged." I shrugged my shoulders under pretence of being unconvinced. As a matter of fact, all I wanted was to make the funny creature talk. "A flimsy _alibi_," I said coldly. "And a want of sympathy," he rejoined. "What has sympathy got to do with a brutal assault on a defenceless old man? You can't deny that Leighton had something, at any rate, to do with it?" "I did not mean sympathy for the guilty," he argued, "but for the women who were the principal witnesses in the case." "I don't see----" I protested. "No, but I do. I understood, and in a great measure I sympathised." At which expression of noble sentiment I burst out laughing. I couldn't help it. In view of his preamble just now his fatuous statement was funny beyond words.