eyelashes resting upon her cheeks, the profusion of long black hair, the delicately chiselled features bit themselves in upon his brain, and for days afterwards the face with its haunting beauty formed and reformed itself before his eyes, no matter upon what he might be engaged. The face threatened to become an obsession. The dead mask was eliminating his remembrance of the living woman, whereas he would have had it otherwise; and partly for that reason, but chiefly because it was the first cause célèbre in which he had been engaged, he purchased all the photographs he could obtain of the dead actress, and, sending them to a miniaturist, ordered a miniature to be painted from them, and hung it in his chambers.

[29]

As time passed slowly on, Tempest’s fascination decreased; but through all his busy life, amongst his multitudinous cases, weird and mysterious as so many of them[30] were, he never forgot the strange story he had heard unfolded at the inquest upon the body of Dolores Alvarez. Many a night when, pushing books and papers on one side, he had lighted his final cigarette before turning into bed, the miniature would catch his eye, and, gazing again at the beautiful face, his thoughts would revert to the familiar story, and once again he would puzzle over the facts he knew, in a vain attempt to find a solution of the mystery. Why had she poisoned herself? As the succeeding years brought him fuller knowledge of men and of women, and of their motives, as case after case widened his experience, so time after time would he again place together the pieces of his puzzle, arranging and rearranging them as crime after crime passing through his hands revealed to him new motives, new characters, any one of which might prove to be analogous and afford him the clue he[31] wanted. Suicide it seemed plain enough to him it must have been. He always remembered how closely he had followed at the time the reasoning of the coroner. He always felt convinced it was logical and conclusive, save in one little detail. Tempest had started his legal career with a certain fixed opinion concerning suicide which he never altered—never had reason to alter—an opinion that grew into conviction. Suicide of itself he held never was and never could be evidence of insanity. He maintained his conviction in argument on many occasions—at the Hardwicke—at the Union—in the courts. He carried his theory further, though not with equal certainty. But he laid it down as a proposition, yet to be disproved, that save in exceptional cases an insane person never commits suicide; and he confined those exceptional cases to cases of previously provable delusions of fact, which facts, if true, 

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