and _those_ are shadows, due
to inserted cheek-pieces, within the mouth, to make the man look
fatter!"

"Why, of course," Charles cried. "India-rubber it must be. That's
why in France they call him le Colonel Caoutchouc!"

"Can you reconstruct the real face from them?" I inquired anxiously.

Dr. Beddersley gazed hard at them. "Give me an hour or two," he
said--"and a box of water-colours. I _think_ by that time--putting
two and two together--I can eliminate the false and build up for you
a tolerably correct idea of what the actual man himself looks like."

We turned him into the library for a couple of hours, with the
materials he needed; and by tea-time he had completed his first
rough sketch of the elements common to the two faces. He brought
it out to us in the drawing-room. I glanced at it first. It was
a curious countenance, slightly wanting in definiteness, and not
unlike those "composite photographs" which Mr. Galton produces by
exposing two negatives on the same sensitised paper for ten seconds
or so consecutively. Yet it struck me at once as containing
something of Colonel Clay in every one of his many representations.
The little curate, in real life, did not recall the Seer; nor
did Elihu Quackenboss suggest Count von Lebenstein or Professor
Schleiermacher. Yet in this compound face, produced only from
photographs of David Granton and Medhurst, I could distinctly trace
a certain underlying likeness to every one of the forms which the
impostor had assumed for us. In other words, though he could make
up so as to mask the likeness to his other characters, he could not
make up so as to mask the likeness to his own personality. He could
not wholly get rid of his native build and his genuine features.

Besides these striking suggestions of the Seer and the curate,
however, I felt vaguely conscious of having seen and observed
_the man himself_ whom the water-colour represented, at some time,
somewhere. It was not at Nice; it was not at Seldon; it was not at
Meran; it was not in America. I believed I had been in a room with
him somewhere in London.

Charles was looking over my shoulder. He gave a sudden little start.
"Why, I know that fellow!" he cried. "You recollect him, Sey; he's
Finglemore's brother--the chap that didn't go out to China!"

Then I remembered at once where it was that I had seen him--at the
broker's in the city, before we sailed for America.

"What Christian name?" I asked.

Charles refl