But it was not Hull who now sat behind Cara Carozza. Wenk’s search was vain; Hull was not present. Cara sat with a stranger behind a player with whom she was sharing the stakes. Then Wenk came to himself. He stopped playing and at once left the hall, sorely vexed with himself. When he was on the winding stair he turned and saw that the stranger with the fair sandy beard was also rising from the table. Wenk had ordered his car to call for him at the house where the musical party was held, and did not remember this till he had walked some distance. Then he retraced his steps and drove home. He went to bed at once, but he could get no sleep, for the thought continually recurred that he had made a mistake to come away, that he ought to have stayed and talked to Basch. He got out of bed again and went through a bundle of depositions in order to quiet his conscience. In going through these documents, written by men who were strangers to him, he got the impression that all of them, losing so much that they could not but ascribe it to foul play, must have sat at the gaming-table very much as Basch did. Had he remained and behaved in a sensible fashion, he would have had an opportunity of seeing for himself at first hand what had hitherto reached him through the testimony of others. Then Wenk became thoroughly discouraged. “I must set to work in quite another way,” he said to himself. “Goodwill and industry are not sufficient. Self-denial and inexorable self-discipline and a little more cunning are necessary! I must make use of every ruse that my opponent displays.... I must make use of disguise and secret spying. I must be prepared to stake myself on the game ... must be myself the snare, if I do not want to be caught in it like a silly pigeon.... A State official with a false beard ... a Browning concealed in his fist ... a jockey-cap, a tall hat, a wig, and so on, like the cinema stage....” In the looking-glass he contemplated his clean-shaven face, finding that when he made grimaces, drew down the corners of his mouth, stretched his jaws, and tried the effect of a beard made out of paper shavings, his features lent themselves very well to disguise. The next day he procured a complete outfit from the Criminal Investigation Department. With the help of a Secret Service expert, he tried all the necessary arts, learned to plaster on a beard, to alter his complexion, make himself look younger or older, change his appearance by scars, and so on. He could now make up as a country cousin, a dispatch-bearing cyclist, a taxicab driver, a porter, waiter, steward, window-cleaner, an “unemployed,” and other characters. In the morning he made an exhaustive examination of the criminal museum which the police had collected, studied the photographs he found there, returned to his various make-ups, and worked with the zeal of a fanatic.