g. He spoke, nevertheless, with a
sort of despairing dignity. "You shall see, then," he said, "that I have
not lost all the family qualities." And he turned suddenly and strode
into an inner room, slamming the door.

"Stop him!" shouted Father Brown, bounding and half falling over a
chair; and, after a wrench or two, Flambeau had the door open. But it
was too late. In dead silence Flambeau strode across and telephoned for
doctor and police.

An empty medicine bottle lay on the floor. Across the table the body
of the man in the brown dressing-gown lay amid his burst and gaping
brown-paper parcels; out of which poured and rolled, not Roman, but very
modern English coins.

The priest held up the bronze head of Caesar. "This," he said, "was all
that was left of the Carstairs Collection."

After a silence he went on, with more than common gentleness: "It was
a cruel will his wicked father made, and you see he did resent it a
little. He hated the Roman money he had, and grew fonder of the real
money denied him. He not only sold the Collection bit by bit, but sank
bit by bit to the basest ways of making money--even to blackmailing his
own family in a disguise. He blackmailed his brother from Australia for
his little forgotten crime (that is why he took the cab to Wagga Wagga
in Putney), he blackmailed his sister for the theft he alone could have
noticed. And that, by the way, is why she had that supernatural guess
when he was away on the sand-dunes. Mere figure and gait, however
distant, are more likely to remind us of somebody than a well-made-up
face quite close."

There was another silence. "Well," growled the detective, "and so this
great numismatist and coin-collector was nothing but a vulgar miser."

"Is there so great a difference?" asked Father Brown, in the same
strange, indulgent tone. "What is there wrong about a miser that is not
often as wrong about a collector? What is wrong, except... thou shalt
not make to thyself any graven image; thou shalt not bow down to them
nor serve them, for I...but we must go and see how the poor young people
are getting on."

"I think," said Flambeau, "that in spite of everything, they are
probably getting on very well."

SEVEN -- The Purple Wig

MR EDWARD NUTT, the industrious editor of the Daily Reformer, sat at
his desk, opening letters and marking proofs to the merry tune of a
typewriter, worked by a vigorous young lady.

He was a stoutish, fair man, in his