fashion, and looked like well-to-do farmers, as they might very naturally have been since it was market-day.  But it seemed to me that their faces were familiar to me.  I looked at them more attentively, and then it suddenly dawned upon me, most unpleasantly, that they resembled Leach and Jezzard.  And yet they were not quite like.  The resemblance was there, but the differences were greater than the lapse of time would account for.  Moreover, the man who resembled Jezzard had a rather large mole on the left cheek just under the eye, while the other man had an eyeglass stuck in one eye, and wore a waxed moustache, whereas Leach had always been clean-shaven, and had never used an eyeglass.

“As I was speculating upon the resemblance they looked up, and caught my intent and inquisitive eye, whereupon they moved away from the window; and when, having completed my purchases, I came out into the street, they were nowhere to be seen.

“That evening, as I was walking by the river outside the town before returning to the station, I overtook a yacht which was being towed down-stream.  Three men were walking ahead on the bank with a long tow-line, and one man stood in the cockpit steering.  As I approached, and was reading the name Otter on the stern, the man at the helm looked round, and with a start of surprise I recognized my old acquaintance Hearn.  The recognition, however, was not mutual, for I had grown a beard in the interval, and I passed on without appearing to notice him; but when I overtook the other three men, and recognized, as I had feared, the other three members of the gang, I must have looked rather hard at Jezzard, for he suddenly halted, and exclaimed:  ’Why, it’s our old friend Ted!  Our long-lost and lamented brother!’ He held out his hand with effusive cordiality, and began to make inquiries as to my welfare; but I cut him short with the remark that I was not proposing to renew the acquaintance, and, turning off on to a footpath that led away from the river, strode off without looking back.

“Naturally this meeting exercised my mind a good deal, and when I thought of the two men whom I had seen in the town, I could hardly believe that their likeness to my quondam friends was a mere coincidence.  And yet when I had met Leach and Jezzard by the river, I had found them little altered, and had particularly noticed that Jezzard had no mole on his face, and that Leach was clean-shaven as of old.

“But a day or two later all my doubts were resolved by a paragraph in the local paper.  It appeared that on the day of my visit to Eastwich a number of forged cheques had been cashed at the three banks.  They had been presented by three well-dressed, horsy-looking men who looked like well-to-do farmers.  One of them had a mole on the left cheek, another was distinguished by a waxed moustache and a single eyeglass, while the description of the third I did not recognize.  None of the cheques had been drawn for large amounts,