that, intending to commit the theft, he had beforehand provided himself
with another stone similar in size and shape--these being well known to
him--to the other, in order to substitute it for the real stone, and
so, for a time at least, escape detection. It is presumable that the
chalice was not often _opened_ by the baronet, and this would therefore
have been a perfectly rational device on the part of Ul-Jabal. But
assuming this to be his mode of thinking, how ludicrously absurd
appears all the trouble he took to _engrave_ the false stone in an
exactly similar manner to the other. _That_ could not help him in
producing the deception, for that he did not contemplate the stone
being _seen_, but only _heard_ in the cup, is proved by the fact that
he selected a stone of a different _colour_. This colour, as I shall
afterwards show you, was that of a pale, brown-spotted stone. But we
are met with something more extraordinary still when we come to the
last stone, the white one--I shall prove that it was white--which
Ul-Jabal placed in the cup. Is it possible that he had provided _two_
substitutes, and that he had engraved these _two_, without object, in
the same minutely careful manner? Your mind refuses to conceive it; and
_having_ done this, declines, in addition, to believe that he had
prepared even one substitute; and I am fully in accord with you in this
conclusion.

'We may say then that Ul-Jabal had not _prepared_ any substitute; and
it may be added that it was a thing altogether beyond the limits of the
probable that he could _by chance_ have possessed two old gems exactly
similar in every detail down to the very half-obliterated letters of
the word "Hasn-us-Sabah." I have now shown, you perceive, that he did
not make them purposely, and that he did not possess them accidentally.
Nor were they the baronet's, for we have his declaration that he had
never seen them before. Whence then did the Persian obtain them? That