Seeing's Believing

A tempest, both meteorological and moral, flings Diana Webster—luminous, iron-willed—into the half-timbered limbo of a country inn where propriety hangs by a cobweb. Beside her stands Jimmy Harrison, affianced to her aunt yet electrically incidental to Diana’s pulse; a single candle brands them conspirators in the eyes of Bruce Terring, war-honed witness whose gaze calcifies suspicion into verdict. Home becomes courthouse when Bruce reappears beneath the same gabled roof, his silence a guillotine. Diana, stung by the tyranny of appearances, orchestrates a tutorial in epistemic humility: she hires two glowering extortionists to stage a counterfeit scandal, a pedagogic forgery meant to prove that retina and reality are estranged kin. But the masquerade metastasizes; blackmail blooms, revolvers click like metronomes, and the sheriff—that democratic equalizer—prepares a mass arrest as if crime were a contagion. Jimmy bursts back into the narrative like a deus ex machina in spats, unmasking the felons and laundering reputions with a single speech. Bruce, chastened, kneels metaphorically, confessing that faith is the only reliable lens; Diana, vindicated yet trembling, learns that the most perilous illusions are those we project for our own instruction.