“Why, Taylor! what brings you here?”

“I thought you would most likely be in, sir,” replied the clerk.  “Do you remember some few years ago making inquiries about a man named Gorton—­and you could not find him?”

“And never have found him,” was Mr. Carr’s comment.  “Well?”

“I have seen him this evening.  He is back in London.”

Thomas Carr was not a man to be startlingly affected by any communication; nevertheless he felt the importance of this, for Lord Hartledon’s sake.

“I met him by chance, in a place where I sometimes go of an evening to smoke a cigar, and learned his name by accident,” continued Mr. Taylor.  “It’s the same man that was at Kedge and Reck’s, George Gorton; he acknowledged it at once, quite readily.”

“And where has he been hiding himself?”

“He has been in Australia for several years, he says; went there directly after he left Kedge and Reck’s that autumn.”

“Could you get him here, Taylor?  I must see him.  Tell me:  what coloured hair has he?”

“Red, sir; and plenty of it.  He says he’s doing very well over there, and has only come home for a short change.  He does not seem to be in concealment, and gave me his address when I asked him for it.”

According to Mr. Carr’s wish, the man Gorton was brought to his chambers the following morning by Taylor.  To the barrister’s surprise, a well-dressed and really rather gentlemanly man entered.  He had been accustomed to picturing this Gorton as an Arab of London life.  Casting a keen glance at the red hair, he saw it was indisputably his own.

A few rapid questions, which Gorton answered without the slightest demur, and Mr. Carr leaned back in his chair, knowing that all the trouble he had been at to find this man might have been spared:  for he was not the George Gordon they had suspected.  But Mr. Carr was cautious, and betrayed nothing.

“I am sorry to have troubled you,” he said.  “When I inquired for you of Kedge and Reck some years ago, it was under the impression that you were some one else.  You had left; and they did not know where to find you.”

“Yes, I had displeased them through arresting a wrong man, and other things.  I was down in the world then, and glad to do anything for a living, even to serving writs.”

“You arrested the late Lord Hartledon for his brother,” observed Mr. Carr, with a careless smile.  “I heard of it.  I suppose you did not know them apart.”

“I had never set eyes on either of them before,” returned Gorton; unconsciously confirming a point in the barrister’s mind; which, however, was already sufficiently obvious.

“The man I wanted to find was named Gordon.  I thought it just possible that you might have changed your name temporarily:  some of us finding it convenient to do so on occasion.”

“I never changed mine in my life.”

“And if you had, I don’t suppose you’d have changed it to one so notorious as George Gordon.”