everywhere.  But in the third place—­and this is very important—­you mark my words, I believe I detect already the lines he will work upon.  He’s a geologist, he says, with a taste for minerals.  Very good.  You see if he doesn’t try to persuade me before long he has found a coal mine, whose locality he will disclose for a trifling consideration; or else he will salt the Long Mountain with emeralds, and claim a big share for helping to discover them; or else he will try something in the mineralogical line to do me somehow.  I see it in the very transparency of the fellow’s face; and I’m determined this time neither to pay him one farthing on any pretext, nor to let him escape me!”

We went in to lunch.  The Professor and Mrs. Forbes-Gaskell, all smiles, accompanied us.  I don’t know whether it was Charles’s warning to take nothing for granted that made me do so—­but I kept a close eye upon the suspected man all the time we were at table.  It struck me there was something very odd about his hair.  It didn’t seem quite the same colour all over.  The locks that hung down behind, over the collar of his coat, were a trifle lighter and a trifle grayer than the black mass that covered the greater part of his head.  I examined it carefully.  The more I did so, the more the conviction grew upon me:  he was wearing a wig.  There was no denying it!

A trifle less artistic, perhaps, than most of Colonel Clay’s get-ups; but then, I reflected (on Charles’s principle of taking nothing for granted), we had never before suspected Colonel Clay himself, except in the one case of the Honourable David, whose red hair and whiskers even Madame Picardet had admitted to be absurdly false by her action of pointing at them and tittering irrepressibly.  It was possible that in every case, if we had scrutinised our man closely, we should have found that the disguise betrayed itself at once (as Medhurst had suggested) to an acute observer.

The detective, in fact, had told us too much.  I remembered what he said to us about knocking off David Granton’s red wig the moment we doubted him; and I positively tried to help myself awkwardly to potato-chips, when the footman offered them, so as to hit the supposed wig with an apparently careless brush of my elbow.  But it was of no avail.  The fellow seemed to anticipate or suspect my intention, and dodged aside carefully, like one well accustomed to saving his disguise from all chance of such real or seeming accidents.

I was so full of my discovery that immediately after lunch I induced Isabel to take our new friends round the home garden and show them Charles’s famous prize dahlias, while I proceeded myself to narrate to Charles and Amelia my observations and my frustrated experiment.

“It is a wig,” Amelia assented. “I spotted it at once.  A very good wig, too, and most artistically planted.  Men don’t notice these things, though women do.  It is creditable to you, Seymour, to have succeeded in detecting it.”