Page:Episodes-before-thirty.djvu/173

Rh single burner. Boyde lay asleep on the floor as usual. I moved softly so as not to wake him. I glanced down. What I saw startled me; more, it gave me a horrid turn. The figure on the mattress was another man. It was not Boyde. Then, as I cautiously looked closer, I discovered my mistake. It was Boyde after all, but without his moustache.

I stared for some minutes in amazement, for the face was completely altered. The drooping, rather heavy moustache had always hidden his lips and mouth. I now saw that mouth. And it was a cruel, brutal mouth, hard, sensual, with ugly thickish lips, contradicting the kindly blue eyes completely. A sentence of detective-sergeant Heidelberg, a headquarters man, came back to me, himself a brutal, heartless type, if ever there was one, but with years of criminal experience behind him: "Watch the mouth and hands and feet," he told me once in court. "They can fake the eyes dead easy, but they can't fake the mouth hell give 'em. They forgit their hands and feet. Watch their mouth and hands and feet--the way these fidgit. That give 'em away every time."

Why had Boyde done this thing? He was a handsome man, the light graceful moustache was a distinct asset in his appearance. Why had he shaved suddenly? I stared at the new horrid face for a long time. He lay sleeping like a child.

I turned to examine the room, as changes might be there too. All seemed as usual, I saw no difference anywhere. Then my eyes fell on the cupboard with its half-opened door. Boyde's coat, that was my own coat, the only thick one we had between us, hung down from the hook. And, for the first time, the sight of that coat stirred a dim, painful memory of the place where I had first worn it. Naturally it was old, but it was also English. The house in Kent rose up--the lime trees on the lawn, the tennis courts, my father's study, his face, my mother's face, their voices even, the very smell and atmosphere and feelings of happy days that now seemed for ever lost. The whole machinery of association worked suddenly at Rh