He was deep in the question of decision when the two apaches had
attacked him in the narrow lane leading to the Basilique of the Sacred
Heart. Matheson was a man of considerable strength and alertness. He had
felled one of the two _apaches_ with his heavy gold-mounted stick; the
other one had sent through the fur-lined coat a knife-thrust which had
grazed his ribs. Matheson had beaten him off, and had then continued his
path to the Basilique.

But the attack had brought a vivid inspiration for the solution of his
personal problem.

He would slip off the personality of Clifford Matheson and take up
completely that of John Rivière. He would leave his overcoat and stick
by the riverside at Neuilly, and 'phone information about them to the
police or to a newspaper. That knife-slit in his overcoat would be taken
as evidence of murder. They would judge him murdered, with robbery as
motive. The courts would give leave for Olive to presume death. She
would be freed; she would come into her husband's fortune; she could
marry again if she chose to.

Surely that was the solution of his personal problem!

For his part he could live his life unshackled, and there was sufficient
money already standing in the name of Rivière at a Paris bank to give
him a modest income on which to keep himself and pay for the materials
of research.

No one would be the worse for his disappearance; his wife would be the
gainer; and mankind, he hoped, would be the gainer through the research
to which he could henceforth devote his life.