“They look to me most blotchy,” Charles murmured.  “Great black lines down the nose, and such spots on the cheek, too!”

“Exactly,” Beddersley put in.  “Those are differences in texture.  They show just how much of the man’s face is human flesh—­”

“And how much wax,” I ventured.

“Not wax,” the expert answered, gazing close.  “This is some harder mixture.  I should guess, a composition of gutta-percha and india-rubber, which takes colour well, and hardens when applied, so as to lie quite evenly, and resist heat or melting.  Look here; that’s an artificial scar, filling up a real hollow; and this is an added bit to the tip of the nose; and those are shadows, due to inserted cheek-pieces, within the mouth, to make the man look fatter!”

“Why, of course,” Charles cried.  “India-rubber it must be.  That’s why in France they call him le Colonel Caoutchouc!”

“Can you reconstruct the real face from them?” I inquired anxiously.

Dr. Beddersley gazed hard at them.  “Give me an hour or two,” he said—­“and a box of water-colours.  I think by that time—­putting two and two together—­I can eliminate the false and build up for you a tolerably correct idea of what the actual man himself looks like.”

We turned him into the library for a couple of hours, with the materials he needed; and by tea-time he had completed his first rough sketch of the elements common to the two faces.  He brought it out to us in the drawing-room.  I glanced at it first.  It was a curious countenance, slightly wanting in definiteness, and not unlike those “composite photographs” which Mr. Galton produces by exposing two negatives on the same sensitised paper for ten seconds or so consecutively.  Yet it struck me at once as containing something of Colonel Clay in every one of his many representations.  The little curate, in real life, did not recall the Seer; nor did Elihu Quackenboss suggest Count von Lebenstein or Professor Schleiermacher.  Yet in this compound face, produced only from photographs of David Granton and Medhurst, I could distinctly trace a certain underlying likeness to every one of the forms which the impostor had assumed for us.  In other words, though he could make up so as to mask the likeness to his other characters, he could not make up so as to mask the likeness to his own personality.  He could not wholly get rid of his native build and his genuine features.

Besides these striking suggestions of the Seer and the curate, however, I felt vaguely conscious of having seen and observed the man himself whom the water-colour represented, at some time, somewhere.  It was not at Nice; it was not at Seldon; it was not at Meran; it was not in America.  I believed I had been in a room with him somewhere in London.

Charles was looking over my shoulder.  He gave a sudden little start.  “Why, I know that fellow!” he cried.  “You recollect him, Sey; he’s Finglemore’s brother—­the chap that didn’t go out to China!”