by a cunning Dutchman; his picture, though also an undoubted Rembrandt, was not the Maria, and was an inferior specimen in bad preservation.  The authority we had consulted turned out to be an ignorant, self-sufficient quack.  The Maria, moreover, was valued by other experts at no more than five or six thousand guineas.  Charles wanted to cry off his bargain, but Dr. Polperro naturally wouldn’t hear of it.  The agreement was a legally binding instrument, and what passed in Charles’s mind at the moment had nothing to do with the written contract.  Our adversary only consented to forego the action for false imprisonment on condition that Charles inserted a printed apology in the Times, and paid him five hundred pounds compensation for damage to character.  So that was the end of our well-planned attempt to arrest the swindler.

Not quite the end, however; for, of course, after this, the whole affair got by degrees into the papers.  Dr. Polperro, who was a familiar person in literary and artistic society, as it turned out, brought an action against the so-called expert who had declared against the genuineness of his alleged Rembrandt, and convicted him of the grossest ignorance and misstatement.  Then paragraphs got about.  The World showed us up in a sarcastic article; and Truth, which has always been terribly severe upon Sir Charles and all the other South Africans, had a pungent set of verses on “High Art in Kimberley.”  By this means, as we suppose, the affair became known to Colonel Clay himself; for a week or two later my brother-in-law received a cheerful little note on scented paper from our persistent sharper.  It was couched in these terms:—­

“Oh, you innocent infant!

“Bless your ingenuous little heart!  And did it believe, then, it had positively caught the redoubtable colonel?  And had it ready a nice little pinch of salt to put upon his tail?  And is it true its respected name is Sir Simple Simon?  How heartily we have laughed, White Heather and I, at your neat little ruses!  It would pay you, by the way, to take White Heather into your house for six months to instruct you in the agreeable sport of amateur detectives.  Your charming naivete quite moves our envy.  So you actually imagined a man of my brains would condescend to anything so flat and stale as the silly and threadbare Old Master deception!  And this in the so-called nineteenth century!  O sancta simplicitas!  When again shall such infantile transparency be mine?  When, ah, when?  But never mind, dear friend.  Though you didn’t catch me, we shall meet before long at some delightful Philippi.

“Yours, with the profoundest respect and gratitude,

“ANTONIO HERRERA,

“Otherwise RICHARD PEPLOE BRABAZON.”

Charles laid down the letter with a deep-drawn sigh.  “Sey, my boy,” he mused aloud, “no fortune on earth—­not even mine—­can go on standing it.  These perpetual drains begin really to terrify me.  I foresee the end.  I shall die in a workhouse.  What with the money he robs me of when he is Colonel Clay, and the money I waste upon him when he isn’t Colonel Clay, the man is beginning to tell upon my nervous system.  I shall withdraw altogether from this worrying life.  I shall retire from a scheming and polluted world to some untainted spot in the fresh, pure mountains.”