rom the neighbouring
vaults of the great house. At each threat of exposure, and in particular
whenever I was directly challenged for an opinion, I made haste to fill
the butler's glass, and by the time we had got to the exchanges, he was
in a condition in which no stamp-collector need be seriously feared. God
forbid I should hint that he was drunk; he seemed incapable of the
necessary liveliness; but the man's eyes were set, and so long as he was
suffered to talk without interruption, he seemed careless of my heeding
him.

In Mr. Denman's exchanges, as in those of little Agnes, the same
peculiarity was to be remarked,--an undue preponderance of that
despicably common stamp, the French twenty-five centimes. And here
joining them in stealthy review, I found the C and the CH; then
something of an A just following; and then a terminal Y. Here was almost
the whole name spelt out to me; it seemed familiar too; and yet for some
time I could not bridge the imperfection. Then I came upon another
stamp, in which an L was legible before the Y, and in a moment the word
leaped up complete. Chailly, that was the name: Chailly-en-Biere, the
post town of Barbizon--ah, there was the very place for any man to hide
himself--there was the very place for Mr. Norris, who had rambled over
England making sketches--the very place for Goddedaal, who had left a
palette-knife on board the _Flying Scud_. Singular, indeed, that while I
was drifting over England with the shyster, the man we were in quest of
awaited me at my own ultimate destination.

Whether Mr. Denman had shown his album to Bellairs, whether, indeed,
Bellairs could have caught (as I did) this hint from an obliterated
postmark, I shall never know, and it mattered not. We were equal now; my
task at Stallbridge-le-Carthew was accomplished; my interest in
postage-stamps died shamelessly away; the astonished Denman was bowed
out; and, ordering the horse to be put in, I plunged into the study of
the time-table.

CHAPTER XXI

FACE TO FACE

I fell from the skies on Barbizon about two o'clock of a September
afternoon. It is the dead hour of the day; all the workers have gone
painting, all the idlers strolling, in the forest or the plain; the
winding causewayed street is solitary, and the inn deserted. I was the
more pleased to find one of my old companions in the dining-room; his
town clothes marked him for a man in the act of departure; and indeed
his portmanteau lay beside h