Mr Vandam’s long yellow face seemed to grow longer as it grew more sinister, while he smiled and answered quietly: ‘If it comes to these coincidences, it was you, I think, who said that a wind from the West would blow away out big men like thistledown.’
‘I know I said it would,’ said the Westerner, with candour; ‘but all the same, how the devil could it?’
The silence was broken by Fenner saying with an abruptness amounting to violence: ‘There’s only one thing to say about this affair. It simply hasn’t happened. It can’t have happened.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Father Brown out of the corner; ‘it has happened all right.’
They all jumped; for the truth was they had all forgotten the insignificant little man who had originally induced them to open the door. And the recovery of memory went with a s
