Chapter I

A man may live all his days without finding his true vocation, and it is often accident that reveals it to him. Herschel might have ended his days a music master only for chance, and Du Maurier towards the finish of his life found that he had been all his life a novelist without knowing it.

Some years ago my friend John Sargenson found on the beach near Dover an old red satin shoe that had been washed ashore tied to a bundle of papers. I have told the story elsewhere and how, brooding over these things, and by powers of analysis and synthesis rarely linked in one brain, he solved the riddle and brought a murderer to justice.

He didn’t continue in the business. He is a very rich man, and God’s beautiful world offers him better objects of pursuit than the crook and criminal; all the same, a year after the shoe business, accident brought him again in touch with a problem. He took the thing up, followed it to its solution and now he wishes he hadn’t. This is the story as he told me it.