the cheque for the Lebenstein
commission--a cheque which Colonel Clay handed to me with the utmost
politeness, requesting to know whether or not it bore my signature.
I caught Charles's eye at the end of the episode, and I venture to
say the expression it wore was one of relief that I too had tripped
over a trifling question of ten per cent on the purchase money of
the castle.

Altogether, I must admit, if it had not been for the police
evidence, we would have failed to make a case against our man
at all. But the police, I confess, had got up their part of the
prosecution admirably. Now that they knew Colonel Clay to be
really Paul Finglemore, they showed with great cleverness how Paul
Finglemore's disappearances and reappearances in London exactly
tallied with Colonel Clay's appearances and disappearances
elsewhere, under the guise of the little curate, the Seer,
David Granton, and the rest of them. Furthermore, they showed
experimentally how the prisoner at the bar might have got himself
up in the various characters; and, by means of a wax bust, modelled
by Dr. Beddersley from observations at Bow Street, and aided by
additions in the gutta-percha composition after Dolly Lingfield's
photographs, they succeeded in proving that the face as it stood
could be readily transformed into the faces of Medhurst and David
Granton. Altogether, their cleverness and trained acumen made up
on the whole for Charles's over-certainty, and they succeeded in
putting before the jury a strong case of their own against Paul
Finglemore.

The trial occupied three days. After the first of the three, my
respected brother-in-law preferred, as he said, not to prejudice the
case against the prisoner by appearing in court again. He did not
even allude to the little matter of the ten per cent commission
further than to say at dinner that evening that all men were bound
to protect their own interests--as secretaries or as principals.
This I took for forgiveness; and I continued diligently to attend
the trial, and watch the case in my employer's interest.

The defence was ingenious, even if somewhat halting. It consisted
simply of an attempt to prove throughout that Charles and I had made
our prisoner the victim of a mistaken identity. Finglemore put into
the box the ingenuous original of the little curate--the Reverend
Septimus Porkington, as it turned out, a friend of his family; and
he showed that it was the Reverend Septimus himself who had s