‘You’ll be going on to the stage, Bagwax, before this is done.’

’I have sometimes thought that it was the career for which I was best adapted.  But, as to the envelope, the facts are now certain.’

‘Any new facts?’ asked Curlydown.  But he asked the question in a jeering tone, not at all as though desiring confidence or offering sympathy.

‘Yes,’ replied Bagwax, slowly.  ’The facts are certainly new,—­and most convincing; but as you have not given attention to the particular branch concerned there can be no good in my mentioning them.  You would not understand me.’  It was thus that he revenged himself on Curlydown.  Then there was again silence between them for a quarter of an hour, during which Curlydown was hurrying through his work, and Bagwax was meditating whether it was certainly his duty to make known the facts as to the postage-stamp.  ‘You are so unkind,’ said Bagwax at last, in a tone of injured friendship, burning to tell his new discovery.

‘You have got it all your way,’ said Curlydown, without lifting his head.  ‘And then, as you said just now,—­I don’t understand.’

‘I’d tell you everything if you’d only be a little less hard.’

Curlydown was envious.  He had, of course, been told of the civil things which Sir John Joram had said; and though he did not quite believe all, he was convinced that Bagwax was supposed to have distinguished himself.  If there was anything to be known he would like to know it.  Nor was he naturally quarrelsome.  Bagwax was his old friend.  ’I don’t mean to be hard,’ he said.  ’Of course one does feel oneself fretted when one has been obliged to miss two trains.’

‘Can I lend a hand?’ said Bagwax.

’It doesn’t signify now.  I can’t catch anything before the 5.20.  One does expect to get away a little earlier than that on a Saturday.  What is it that you’ve found out?’

‘Do you really care to know?’

’Of course I do,—­if it’s anything in earnest.  I took quite as much interest as you in the matter when we were down at Cambridge.’

‘You see that postage-stamp?’ Bagwax stretched out the envelope,—­or rather the photograph of the envelope, for it was no more.  But the Queen’s head, with all its obliterating smudges, and all its marks and peculiarities, were to be seen quite as plainly as on the original, which was tied up carefully among the archives of the trial.  ’You see that postage-stamp?’ Curlydown took his glass, and looked at the document, and declared that he saw the postage-stamp very plainly.

‘But it does not tell you anything particular?’

‘Nothing very particular—­at the first glance,’ said Curlydown, gazing through the glass with all his eyes.

‘Look again.’

‘I see that they obliterate out there with a kind of star.’

‘That has nothing to do with it.’

’The bunch of hair at the back of the head isn’t quite like our bunch of hair.’