And it was there in cold, implacable print.
Derwent Conniston--that phoenix among men, by whom he had come to
measure all other men, that Crichton of nerve, of calm and audacious
courage, of splendid poise--a burglar! It was cheap, farcical, an
impossible absurdity. Had it been murder, high treason, defiance of
some great law, a great crime inspired by a great passion or a great
ideal, but it was burglary, brigandage of the cheapest and most
commonplace variety, a sneaking night-coward's plagiarism of real
adventure and real crime. It was impossible. Keith gritted the words
aloud. He might have accepted Conniston as a Dick Turpin, a Claude
Duval or a Macheath, but not as a Jeremy Diddler or a Bill Sykes. The
printed lines were lies. They must be. Derwent Conniston might have
killed a dozen men, but he had never cracked a safe. To think it was to
think the inconceivable.
He turned to the letters. They were postmarked Darlington, England. His
fingers tingled as he opened the first. It was as he had expected, as
he had hoped. They were from Mary Josephine. He arranged them--nine in
all--in the sequence of their dates, which ran back nearly eight years.
All of them had been written within a period of eleven months.
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