after. And why won't Aylmore tell? Clearly
because it must have been in some undesirable place. And then, all of a
sudden, it flashed on me in a moment of--what do you writing fellows
call those moments, Spargo?"

"Inspiration, I should think," said Spargo. "Direct inspiration."

"That's it. In a moment of direct inspiration, it flashed on me--why,
twenty years ago, Maitland was in Dartmoor--they must have met there!
And so, we got some old warders who'd been there at that time to come
to town, and we gave 'em opportunities to see Aylmore and to study him.
Of course, he's twenty years older, and he's grown a beard, but they
began to recall him, and then one man remembered that if he was the man
they thought he'd a certain birth-mark. And--he has!"

"Does Aylmore know that he's been identified?" asked Spargo.

Rathbury pitched his cigar into the fireplace and laughed.

"Know!" he said scornfully. "Know? He's admitted it. What was the use
of standing out against proof like that. He admitted it tonight in my
presence. Oh, he knows all right!"

"And what did he say?"

Rathbury laughed contemptuously.

"Say? Oh, not much. Pretty much what he said about this affair--that
when he was convicted the time before he was an innocent man. He's
certainly a good hand at playing the innocent game."

"And of what was he convicted?"

"Oh, of course, we know all about it--now. As soon as we found out who
he really was, we had all the particulars turned up. Aylmore, or
Ainsworth (Stephen Ainsworth his name really is) was a man who ran a
sort of what they call a Mutual Benefit Society in a town right away up
in the North--Cloudhampton--some thirty years ago. He was nominally
secretary, but it was really his own affair. It was patronized by the
working classes--Cloudhampton's a purely artisan population--and they
stuck a lot of their brass, as they call it, in it. Then suddenly it
came to smash, and there was nothing. He--Ainsworth, or Aylmore--
pleaded that he was robbed and duped by another man, but the court
didn't believe him, and he got seven years. Plain story you see,
Spargo, when it all comes out, eh?"

"All stories are quite plain--when they come out," observed Spargo.
"And he kept silence now, I suppose, because he didn't want his
daughters to know about his past?"

"Just so," agreed Rathbury. "And I don't know that I blame him. He
thought, of course, that he'd go scot-free over this Marbury affair.
But he made his