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