who behold it--a face never to
be forgotten; and there was that face in the miniature that lay within
my hand. True, that in the miniature the man was a few years older than
in the portrait I had seen, or than the original was even at the time of
his death. But a few years!--why, between the date in which flourished
that direful noble and the date in which the miniature was evidently
painted, there was an interval of more than two centuries. While I was
thus gazing, silent and wondering, Mr J---- said:

"But is it possible? I have known this man."

"How--where?" I cried.

"In India. He was high in the confidence of the Rajah of ----, and
wellnigh drew him into a revolt which would have lost the Rajah his
dominions. The man was a Frenchman--his name de V----, clever, bold,
lawless. We insisted on his dismissal and banishment: it must be the
same man--no two faces like his--yet this miniature seems nearly a
hundred years old."

Mechanically I turned round the miniature to examine the back of it, and
on the back was engraved a pentacle; in the middle of the pentacle a
ladder, and the third step of the ladder was formed by the date 1765.
Examining still more minutely, I detected a spring; this, on being
pressed, opened the back of the miniature as a lid. Withinside the lid
was engraved "Mariana to thee--Be faithful in life and in death to
----." Here follows a name that I will not mention, but it was not
unfamiliar to me. I had heard it spoken of by old men in my childhood as
the name borne by a dazzling charlatan, who had made a great sensation
in London for a year or so, and had fled the country on the charge of a
double murder within his own house--that of his mistress and his rival.
I said nothing of this to Mr J----, to whom reluctantly I resigned the
miniature.

We had found no difficulty in opening the first drawer within the iron
safe; we found great difficulty in opening the second: it was not
locked, but it resisted all efforts till we inserted in the chinks the
edge of a chisel. When we had thus drawn it forth, we found a very
singular apparatus in the nicest order. Upon a small thin book, or
rather tablet, was placed a saucer of crystal; this saucer was filled
with a clear liquid--on that liquid floated a kind of compass, with a
needle shifting rapidly round, but instead of the usual points of a
compass were seven strange characters, not very unlike those used by
astrologers to denote the planets. A very