Welcome back, everyone to 1001 classic short stories and tales.

This is your host and storyteller, John Haggardhorn.

And listen to another Father Brown story.

This one called The Worst Crime in the World. From G.K. Chesterton's collection, The Wisdom of Father Brown. And now our story. Father Brown was wandering through a picture gallery with an expression that suggested that he had not

come there to look at the pictures. Indeed, he did not want to look at the pictures, though he liked

pictures well enough. Not that there was anything immoral or improper about those highly modern

pictorial designs,

he would indeed be of an inflammable temperament who was stirred to any of the more pagan passions

by the display of interrupted spirals,

inverted cones, and broken cylinders,

with which the art of the future inspired or menaced mankind.

The truth is that Father Brown was looking for a young friend who had chosen that somewhat

incongruous meeting place, being herself of a more futuristic turn.

The young friend was also a young relative, one of the few relatives that he had.

Her name was Elizabeth Fane, simplified into Betty,

and she was the child of a sister who had married into a race of refined but impoverished squires.

As the squire was dead as well as impoverished, Father Brown stood in the relation of a

protector as well as a priest, and in some sense a guardian as well as an

uncle. At the moment, however, he was blinking about at the groups in the gallery without

catching sight of the familiar brown hair and bright face of his niece. Nevertheless, he saw some

people he knew and a number of people he did not know, including

some that, as a mere matter of taste, he did not much want to know.

...