Two of the wainscoted walls were flanked with deep shelves, filled with bottles, vials, jugs, carboys, and no end of paraphernalia required in a chemist’s laboratory. A zinc-covered table occupied one side of the room. It was littered with like articles. A Bunsen burner was in operation under a retort held in a tripod, and in which a dark fluid was bubbling furiously, while drops of distillation fell slowly from the end of a metal coil into a vial placed to receive them. All this was visible in the white light from several electric lamps, as were the faces and figures of the three occupants of the spacious room, which obviously was a chemist’s laboratory. One was a gaunt, angular man of nearly sixty, with a wrinkled, hard-featured face, thin lips, and a square jaw, a hooked nose and sunken eyes, that gleamed and glittered venomously in their cavernous sockets. It was, plainly enough, the face of a man whose life had been a continuous round, not of enjoyments, but of disappointments, until his nature had soured and his soul rebelled, and early ambition died from his calloused heart. Another was a woman of about the same age and of much the same aspect, as if she had been the partner of his vain hopes and consequent woes, as indeed she had. Both were cheaply and carelessly clad, bordering close upon slovenly. They were seated on common wooden chairs near the zinc-covered table. All this paled to utter insignificance, however, in view of Patsy Garvan’s overwhelming amazement when his gaze fell upon the third person in the room. He was utterly nonplused. He could, as he afterward said, have been knocked toes up with a feather. There was no mistaking the man, no possibility of error. The error had been made more than twelve months before. The man was Garside--and not Garside. His neatly plastered hair was lying on the table, also his flowing mustache and carefully trimmed beard--as artistic and effective a disguise as ever adorned the face of a stage star, or blinded the searching scrutiny of a detective to the sinister features of a crook. He was seated directly opposite the couple described. He evidently had removed his disguise because of the heat in the room. With his thin, clean-cut features and his own close-cut hair, a more pronounced change could scarce be imagined. For this man now had become, and in reality was--a veritable personal counterfeit of the man for whom he had been acting as a private secretary for more than three months, and in whose home he had been dwelling unsuspected--a living likeness of Chester Clayton himself. One glance convinced Patsy Garvan of his identity, though it was like seeing a ghost, the dead alive--the man who was supposed to have been killed by a bullet from Chick Carter’s revolver, or to have been drowned in the swirling current of a stream in the Berkshire Hills.