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 full pressure. It was like a blow. I realized vividly the awful gap between those days and these, between myself as I had been and as I was. A whiff of perfume, a smell, produces this kind of evocation in most cases; with me, just then, it was my old English coat. I remember the strong emotion in me, and that, while still held and gripped by it, my eye caught sight of an envelope sticking out of the inside breast pocket. The coat hung by chance in a way that made it visible. It might easily fall out altogether. I moved over and stretched out a hand to put it safely back and then saw that the writing on the envelope was my own. It was a letter. I took it out. The address was the house in Kent, whose atmosphere still hung about my thoughts. The name was my mother’s name. There were other letters, all my own; one to my father; two to my brother, the one being in the world I really loved, the only one of the family to whom I had given vague hints of the real state of affairs. Some of the letters were two weeks, three weeks old. In each case the five-cent stamp had been torn off. Five cents meant a glass of lager and a meal at a free lunch counter.