“Are you fishing for a compliment?  Or is that really natural modesty?  I had heard of your exploits and seen your name in the papers, oh, dozens of times before I first had the pleasure of meeting you; and since then ...  No, I shan’t flatter you by saying how many successes I have seen recorded to your credit in the past two years.  Do you know that I have a natural predilection for such things?  It may be morbid of me—­is it?—­but I have the strongest kind of a leaning toward the tales of Gaboriau; and I have always wanted to know a really great detective—­like Lecocq, or Dupin.  And that day at Ascot when Mr. Narkom told me that he would introduce me to the famous ’Man of the Forty Faces’...  Mr. Cleek, why do they call you ‘the Man of the Forty Faces’?  You always look the same to me.”

“Perhaps I shan’t, when we come to the end of the heath and get into the public street, where there are lights and people,” he said.  “That I always look the same in your eyes, Miss Lorne, is because I have but one face for you, and that is my real one.  Not many people see it, even among the men of The Yard whom I occasionally work with.  You do, however; so does Mr. Narkom, occasionally.  So did that boy, unfortunately.  I had to show it when I came to your assistance, if only to assure you that you were in friendly hands and to prevent you taking fright and running off into the mist in a panic and losing yourself where even I might not be able to find you.  That is why I told the boy to apply for work to ‘Captain Burbage of Clarges Street.’ I am Captain Burbage, Miss Lome.  Nobody knows that but my good friend Mr. Narkom and, now, you.”

“I shall respect it, of course,” she said.  “I hope I need not assure you of that, Mr. Cleek.”

“You need assure me of nothing, Miss Lome,” he made reply.  “I owe so much more to you than you are aware, that—­Oh, well, it doesn’t matter.  You asked me a question a moment ago.  If you want the answer to it—­look here.”

He stopped short as he spoke; the pocket-torch clicked faintly and from the shelter of a curved hand, the glow of it struck upward to his face.  It was not the same face for ten seconds at a time.  What Sir Horace Wyvern had seen in Mr. Narkom’s private office at Scotland Yard on that night of nights more than two years ago, Sir Horace Wyvern’s niece saw now.

“Oh!” she said, with a sharp intaking of the breath as she saw the writhing features knot and twist and blend.  “Oh, don’t!  It is uncanny!  It is amazing.  It is awful!” And, after a moment, when the light had been shut off and the man beside her was only a shape in the mist:  “I hope I may never see you do it again,” she merely more than whispered.  “It is the most appalling thing.  I can’t think how you do it—­how you came by the power to do such a thing.”