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48 tions. His discovery gave him a certain courage. It took away some of the weirdness of the thing, and suggested the prosaic course of inquiring into the origin of the curio. He sought the manager of the auction room, who, with a smile and bow, professed entire ignorance of the source whence the mirror had come. Caverley, taking out a twenty-dollar note, clipped it in two with his pocket scissors, and handed one half to the auctioneer.

"This half is now useless to me," he said, "but it will be worth twenty dollars to you when you discover who sold you the mirror."

Some weeks passed and Caverley studied the mirror in a practical way. He noted that it was of unusual thickness, and this aroused his suspicions.

"I’ll take it to pieces," said he, and this he proceeded to do. It took considerable time and patience to work the back loose without damaging the glass, but, by dint of perseverance, he managed it. Back of the glass, he found a shallow metal pan. He attacked this, and in a few moments had separated it from the mirror proper. The pan removed, the whole matter was plain. Set slantwise beneath the bevelling on the right-hand side was an ambrotype of the face he knew so well. The picture extended perhaps a third of the distance across the mirror, and was covered with a thick plate of glass, so that looking squarely into the mirror, reflection was normal, but by sloping it to the right until the ambrotype was horizontal, the face with the scars appeared.

Caverley took the ambrotype to the light and stood looking at it for some time.

"Whoever you are," said he, "you're not an attractive chap, but I'd double that twenty to find out about you."

The matter was rapidly slipping from his mind when one day the manager of the auction-room called on him and brought with him an elderly gentleman whom Caverley judged rightly to be a lawyer.

"That mirror," the elderly gentleman said when the matter on which they had called was broached, "was the property of a client of mine, a Miss Damon. It was sold, after her death, with a lot of other personal property not disposed of in her will. There's a queer story about it, but I don't know that I can tell it correctly, for it was told to me in fragments whenever my client cared to