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The Incredulity of Father Brown frown, but in his eyes was no longer the cloud of mystification, but a light of almost terrible understanding.

"What a fool I am!" he muttered. "I ought to have seen it long ago. The tale of the curse ought to have told me."

"Do you mean to say," demanded Tarrant, "that we can really be killed now by something that happened in the thirteenth century?"

Father Brown shook his head and answered with quiet emphasis:

"I won't discuss whether we can be killed by something that happened in the thirteenth century; but I'm jolly certain that we can't be killed by something that never happened in the thirteenth century, something that never happened at all."

"Well," said Tarrant, "it's refreshing to find a priest so sceptical of the supernatural as all that."

"Not at all," replied the priest calmly; "it's not the supernatural part I doubt. It's the natural part. I'm exactly in the position of the man who said, 'I can believe the impossible, but not the improbable.

"That's what you call a paradox, isn't it?" asked the other.

"It's what I call common sense, properly understood," replied Father Brown. 'It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, that deals