or twice in the years they had been together. He fingered the
card, scrutinized it carefully, turned it over, looked heavenward
reflectively, as though the final permission for the visit remained with
him, and finally admitted the visitor.

"Mr. Ingolby ain't in," he said. "He went out a little while back. You
got to wait," he added sulkily, as he showed the Romany into Ingolby's
working-room.

As Jim did so, he saw lying on a chair a suit of clothes on top of which
were a wig and false beard and moustache. Instantly he got between the
visitor and the make-up. The parcel was closed when he was in the room a
half-hour before. Ingolby had opened it since, had been called out, and
had forgotten to cover the things up or put them away.

"Sit down," Jim said to the Romany, still covering the disguise. Then
he raised them in his arms, and passed with them into another room,
muttering angrily to himself.

The Romany had seen, however. They were the first things on which his
eyes had fallen when he entered the room. A wig, a false beard, and
workman's clothes! What were they for? Were these disguises for the
Master Gorgio? Was he to wear them? If so, he--Jethro Fawe--would
watch and follow him wherever he went. Had these disguises to do with
Fleda--with his Romany lass?

His pulses throbbed; he was in an overwrought mood. He was ready for any
illusion, susceptible to any vagary of the imagination.

He looked round the room. So this was the way the swaggering, masterful
Gorgio lived?

Here were pictures and engravings which did not seem to belong to a new
town in a new land, where everything was useful or spectacular. Here
was a sense of culture and refinement. Here were finished and unfinished
water-colours done by Ingolby's own hand or bought by him from some
hard-up artist earning his way mile by mile, as it were. Here were
books, not many, but well-bound and important-looking, covering fields
in which Jethro Fawe had never browsed, into which, indeed, he had
never entered. If he had opened them he would have seen a profusion of
marginal notes in pencil, and slips of paper stuck in the pages to mark
important passages.

He turned from them to the welcome array of weapons on the walls-rifles,
shotguns, Indian bows, arrows and spears, daggers, and great
sheath-knives such as are used from the Yukon to Bolivia, and a sabre
with a faded ribbon of silk tied to the handle. This was all that Max
Ingolby had inherited from