sign the cheque?" Sir Charles
cried. "How did he manage the card trick?"

The Commissary produced a similar card from his pocket. "Was that
the sort of thing?" he asked.

"Precisely! A facsimile."

"I thought so. Well, our Colonel, I find, bought a packet of such
cards, intended for admission to a religious function, at a shop
in the Quai Massena. He cut out the centre, and, see here--" The
Commissary turned it over, and showed a piece of paper pasted neatly
over the back; this he tore off, and there, concealed behind it, lay
a folded cheque, with only the place where the signature should be
written showing through on the face which the Seer had presented
to us. "I call that a neat trick," the Commissary remarked, with
professional enjoyment of a really good deception.

"But he burnt the envelope before my eyes," Sir Charles exclaimed.

"Pooh!" the Commissary answered. "What would he be worth as a
conjurer, anyway, if he couldn't substitute one envelope for another
between the table and the fireplace without your noticing it? And
Colonel Clay, you must remember, is a prince among conjurers."

"Well, it's a comfort to know we've identified our man, and the
woman who was with him," Sir Charles said, with a slight sigh of
relief. "The next thing will be, of course, you'll follow them up
on these clues in England and arrest them?"

The Commissary shrugged his shoulders. "Arrest them!" he exclaimed,
much amused. "Ah, monsieur, but you are sanguine! No officer of
justice has ever succeeded in arresting le Colonel Caoutchouc, as
we call him in French. He is as slippery as an eel, that man. He
wriggles through our fingers. Suppose even we caught him, what could
we prove? I ask you. Nobody who has seen him once can ever swear
to him again in his next impersonation. He is impayable, this good
Colonel. On the day when I arrest him, I assure you, monsieur, I
shall consider myself the smartest police-officer in Europe."

"Well, I shall catch him yet," Sir Charles answered, and relapsed
into silence.

II

THE EPISODE OF THE DIAMOND LINKS

"Let us take a trip to Switzerland," said Lady Vandrift. And any one
who knows Amelia will not be surprised to learn that we _did_ take a
trip to Switzerland accordingly. Nobody can drive Sir Charles, except
his wife. And nobody at all can drive Amelia.

There were difficulties at the outset, because we had not ordered
rooms at the hotels beforehand, and it was well on in th