nd unscrupulous man;
anything which might give him a power of threat or exaction? Mind, I am
not asking you to tell me any secret you have reasons for concealing,
but I suggest that it might be prudent if you did not let M. Lebeau know
your real name and rank; if, in short, you could follow his example, and
adopt a disguise. But no; when I think of it, you would doubtless be so
unpractised in the art of disguise that he would detect you at once
to be other than you seem; and if suspecting you of spying into his
secrets, and if those secrets be really of a political nature, your very
life might not be safe."

"Thank you for your hint; the disguise is an excellent idea, and
combines amusement with precaution. That this Victor de Mauleon must
be a very unprincipled and dangerous man is, I think, abundantly clear.
Granting that he was innocent of all design of robbery in the affair
of the jewels, still, the offence which he did own--that of admitting
himself at night by a false key into the rooms of a wife, whom he sought
to surprise or terrify into dishonour--was a villanous action; and his
present course of life is sufficiently mysterious to warrant the
most unfavourable supposition. Besides, there is another motive for
concealing my name from him: you say that he once had a duel with a
Vane, who was very probably my father, and I have no wish to expose
myself to the chance of his turning up in London some day, and seeking
to renew there the acquaintance that I had courted at Paris. As for my
skill in playing any part I may assume, do not fear; I am no novice in
that. In my younger days I was thought clever in private theatricals,
especially in the transformations of appearance which belong to light
comedy and farce. Wait a few minutes, and you shall see."

Graham then retreated into his bedroom, and in a few minutes reappeared
so changed, that Renard at first glance took him for a stranger. He had
doffed his dress--which habitually, when in Capitals, was characterized
by the quiet, indefinable elegance that to a man of the great world,
high-bred and young, seems "to the manner born"--for one of those coarse
suits which Englishmen are wont to wear in their travels, and by which
they are represented in French or German caricatures,--loose jacket of
tweed with redundant pockets, waistcoat to match, short dust-coloured
trousers. He had combed his hair straight over his forehead, which, as I
have said somewhere before, appea