An imagination which
might well have become atrophied through disuse had him as
thoroughly in its control as ever he had had his Pickering Giant.
He believed almost with devoutness in the plot which he had
detected for the spoliation of Lord Wetherby's summer-house, that
plot of which he held Lord Dawlish to be the mainspring. And it
must be admitted that circumstances had combined to help his
belief. If the atmosphere in which he was moving was not sinister
then there was no meaning in the word.
Summer homes had been burgled, there was no getting away from
that--half a dozen at least in the past two months. He was a
stranger in the locality, so had no means of knowing that summer
homes were always burgled on Long Island every year, as regularly
as the coming of the mosquito and the advent of the jelly-fish. It
was one of the local industries. People left summer homes lying
about loose in lonely spots, and you just naturally got in through
the cellar window. Such was the Long Islander's simple creed.
This created in Mr Pickering's mind an atmosphere of burglary, a
receptiveness, as it were, toward burglars as phenomena, and the
extremely peculiar behaviour of the person whom in his thoughts he
always referred to as The Man crystallized it. He had seen The Man
hanging about, peering in at windows.
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