My position was now highly false; and I believe it was in mere pity that Mrs. Higgs came to my rescue with a welcome proposition.  If the gentleman was really interested in stamps, she said, probably supposing me a monomaniac on the point, he should see Mr. Denman’s album.  Mr. Denman had been collecting forty years, and his collection was said to be worth a mint of money.  “Agnes,” she went on, “if you were a kind little girl, you would run over to the ’All, tell Mr. Denman there’s a connaisseer in the ’ouse, and ask him if one of the young gentlemen might bring the album down.”

“I should like to see his exchanges too,” I cried, rising to the occasion.  “I may have some of mine in my pocket-book and we might trade.”

Half an hour later Mr. Denman arrived himself with a most unconscionable volume under his arm.  “Ah, sir,” he cried, “when I ’eard you was a collector, I dropped all.  It’s a saying of mine, Mr. Dodsley, that collecting stamps makes all collectors kin.  It’s a bond, sir; it creates a bond.”

Upon the truth of this, I cannot say; but there is no doubt that the attempt to pass yourself off for a collector falsely creates a precarious situation.

“Ah, here’s the second issue!” I would say, after consulting the legend at the side.  “The pink—­no, I mean the mauve—­yes, that’s the beauty of this lot.  Though of course, as you say,” I would hasten to add, “this yellow on the thin paper is more rare.”

Indeed I must certainly have been detected, had I not plied Mr. Denman in self-defence with his favourite liquor—­a port so excellent that it could never have ripened in the cellar of the Carthew Arms, but must have been transported, under cloud of night, from the neighbouring vaults of the great house.  At each threat of exposure, and in particular whenever I was directly challenged for an opinion, I made haste to fill the butler’s glass, and by the time we had got to the exchanges, he was in a condition in which no stamp collector need be seriously feared.  God forbid I should hint that he was drunk; he seemed incapable of the necessary liveliness; but the man’s eyes were set, and so long as he was suffered to talk without interruption, he seemed careless of my heeding him.

In Mr. Denman’s exchanges, as in those of little Agnes, the same peculiarity was to be remarked, an undue preponderance of that despicably common stamp, the French twenty-five centimes.  And here joining them in stealthy review, I found the C and the CH; then something of an A just following; and then a terminal Y. Here was also the whole name spelt out to me; it seemed familiar, too; and yet for some time I could not bridge the imperfection.  Then I came upon another stamp, in which an L was legible before the Y, and in a moment the word leaped up complete.  Chailly, that was the name; Chailly-en-Biere, the post town of Barbizon—­ah, there was the very place for any man to hide himself—­there was the very place for Mr. Norris, who had rambled over England making sketches—­the very place for Goddedaal, who had left a palette-knife on board the Flying Scud.  Singular, indeed, that while I was drifting over England with the shyster, the man we were in quest of awaited me at my own ultimate destination.