devil tells you something is too fearful to
look at, look at it. If he says something is too terrible to hear, hear
it. If you think some truth unbearable, bear it. I entreat your Grace to
end this nightmare now and here at this table."

"If I did," said the Duke in a low voice, "you and all you believe, and
all by which alone you live, would be the first to shrivel and perish.
You would have an instant to know the great Nothing before you died."

"The Cross of Christ be between me and harm," said Father Brown. "Take
off your wig."

I was leaning over the table in ungovernable excitement; in listening
to this extraordinary duel half a thought had come into my head. "Your
Grace," I cried, "I call your bluff. Take off that wig or I will knock
it off."

I suppose I can be prosecuted for assault, but I am very glad I did it.
When he said, in the same voice of stone, "I refuse," I simply sprang
on him. For three long instants he strained against me as if he had all
hell to help him; but I forced his head until the hairy cap fell off it.
I admit that, whilst wrestling, I shut my eyes as it fell.

I was awakened by a cry from Mull, who was also by this time at the
Duke's side. His head and mine were both bending over the bald head
of the wigless Duke. Then the silence was snapped by the librarian
exclaiming: "What can it mean? Why, the man had nothing to hide. His
ears are just like everybody else's."

"Yes," said Father Brown, "that is what he had to hide."

The priest walked straight up to him, but strangely enough did not even
glance at his ears. He stared with an almost comical seriousness at his
bald forehead, and pointed to a three-cornered cicatrice, long healed,
but still discernible. "Mr Green, I think." he said politely, "and he
did get the whole estate after all."

And now let me tell the readers of the Daily Reformer what I think the
most remarkable thing in the whole affair. This transformation scene,
which will seem to you as wild and purple as a Persian fairy-tale, has
been (except for my technical assault) strictly legal and constitutional
from its first beginnings. This man with the odd scar and the ordinary
ears is not an impostor. Though (in one sense) he wears another man's
wig and claims another man's ear, he has not stolen another man's
coronet. He really is the one and only Duke of Exmoor. What happened was
this. The old Duke really had a slight malformation of the ear, which
really was more or