"Do you—do you mean to suggest," I gasped, when I had sufficient breath to gasp, "that I—I've been cheating?"
"That is what I do mean. You have hit it on the head. It is inconvenient for you, no doubt. But I'm going to make it more inconvenient still. I'm going to prove it before the sitting's ended."
"You—you infernal scoundrel!"
I sprang up, as if to strike the fellow to the ground. But he remained entirely unmoved. His calmness, or assurance, rather reacted on me, and I refrained.
"Suppose we leave the adjectives till a little later on? Then, it is just possible that each man will have a few of his own to scatter round."
He turned to my antagonists.
"It's funny, gentlemen, very—but directly I saw those cards I thought I'd seen that pack before. I have a good eye for a card. The more I saw of them the more I felt that we had met before. And now I'll swear we have. A pack of cards very like that pack once belonged to a very famous personage; more famous, perhaps, than worthy. His name was Francis Farmer."
My surprise at hearing this name from the stranger's lips must have betrayed itself in my countenance. He immediately turned to me.
"I fancy that is a name which this gentleman has heard before. Is that not so?"
"I—I have heard it before," I stammered.
"I thought you had. Yes, gentlemen, there is the own brother to this pack of cards at this moment in the museum at Scotland Yard. Perhaps this gentle-
