«
    »Perhaps you would kindly give me a sketch of the course of events from
memory.«
    »Certainly, though I cannot guarantee that I carry all the facts in my mind.
Intense mental concentration has a curious way of blotting out what has passed.
The barrister who has his case at his fingers' ends and is able to argue with an
expert upon his own subject finds that a week or two of the courts will drive it
all out of his head once more. So each of my cases displaces the last, and Mlle.
Carère has blurred my recollection of Baskerville Hall. To-morrow some other
little problem may be submitted to my notice which will in turn dispossess the
fair French lady and the infamous Upwood. So far as the case of the hound goes,
however, I will give you the course of events as nearly as I can, and you will
suggest anything which I may have forgotten.
    My inquiries show beyond all question that the family portrait did not lie,
and that this fellow was indeed a Baskerville. He was a son of that Rodger
Baskerville, the younger brother of Sir Charles, who fled with a sinister
reputation to South America, where he was said to have died unmarried. He did,
as a matter of fact, marry, and had one child, this fellow, whose real name is
the same as his father's. He married Beryl Garcia, one of the beauties of Costa
Rica, and, having purloined a considerable sum of public money, he changed his
name to Vandeleur and fled to England, where he established a school in the east
of Yorkshire. His reason for attempting this special line of business was that
he had struck up an acquaintance with a consumptive tutor upon the voyage home,
and that he had used this man's ability to make the undertaking a success.
Fraser, the tutor, died, however, and the school which had begun well sank from
disrepute into infamy. The Vandeleurs found it convenient to change their name
to Stapleton, and he brought the remains of his fortune, his schemes for the
future, and his taste for entomology to the south of England. I learn at the
British Museum that he was a recognized authority upon the subject, and that the
name of Vandeleur has been permanently attached to a certain moth which he had,
in his Yorkshire days, been the first to describe.
    We now come to that portion of his life which has proved to be of such
intense interest to us. The fellow had evidently made inquiry and found that
only two lives intervened between him and a valuable