“A man must protect himself,” Charles burst out.

“At the expense of those who have put their trust in his honour and integrity,” the judge commented coldly.

After four mortal hours of it, all to the same effect, my respected brother-in-law left the witness-box at last, wiping his brow and biting his lip, with the very air of a culprit.  His character had received a most serious blow.  While he stood in the witness-box all the world had felt it was he who was the accused and Colonel Clay who was the prosecutor.  He was convicted on his own evidence of having tried to induce the supposed David Granton to sell his father’s interests into an enemy’s hands, and of every other shady trick into which his well-known business acuteness had unfortunately hurried him during the course of his adventures.  I had but one consolation in my brother-in-law’s misfortunes—­and that was the thought that a due sense of his own shortcomings might possibly make him more lenient in the end to the trivial misdemeanours of a poor beggar of a secretary!

I was the next in the box.  I do not desire to enlarge upon my own achievements.  I will draw a decent veil, indeed, over the painful scene that ensued when I finished my evidence.  I can only say I was more cautious than Charles in my recognition of the photographs; but I found myself particularly worried and harried over other parts of my cross-examination.  Especially was I shaken about that misguided step I took in the matter of the cheque for the Lebenstein commission—­a cheque which Colonel Clay handed to me with the utmost politeness, requesting to know whether or not it bore my signature.  I caught Charles’s eye at the end of the episode, and I venture to say the expression it wore was one of relief that I too had tripped over a trifling question of ten per cent on the purchase money of the castle.

Altogether, I must admit, if it had not been for the police evidence, we would have failed to make a case against our man at all.  But the police, I confess, had got up their part of the prosecution admirably.  Now that they knew Colonel Clay to be really Paul Finglemore, they showed with great cleverness how Paul Finglemore’s disappearances and reappearances in London exactly tallied with Colonel Clay’s appearances and disappearances elsewhere, under the guise of the little curate, the Seer, David Granton, and the rest of them.  Furthermore, they showed experimentally how the prisoner at the bar might have got himself up in the various characters; and, by means of a wax bust, modelled by Dr. Beddersley from observations at Bow Street, and aided by additions in the gutta-percha composition after Dolly Lingfield’s photographs, they succeeded in proving that the face as it stood could be readily transformed into the faces of Medhurst and David Granton.  Altogether, their cleverness and trained acumen made up on the whole for Charles’s over-certainty, and they succeeded in putting before the jury a strong case of their own against Paul Finglemore.