‘Oh yes, you have,’ said Father Brown.
There was a silence as sudden as the stroke of a gong; a silence in which that sub-conscious guesswork that was so active and accurate in the woman moved her almost to a shriek.
‘That is exactly what you have seen,’ went on the priest. ‘You have seen his body. You haven’t seen him—the real living man; but you have seen his body all right. You have stared at it hard by the light of four great candles; and it was not tossing suicidally in the sea but lying in state like a Prince of the Church in a shrine built before the Crusade.’
‘In plain words,’ said Tarrant, ‘you actually ask us to believe that the embalmed body was really the corpse of a murdered man.’
Father Brown was silent for a moment; then he said almost with an air of irrelevance:
‘The f
