“Why?” Tembarom asked laconically. “He looked like Jem Temple Barholm.” He saw Tembarom start. There could be no denying it. “You thought that? Honest?” he said sharply, as if for a moment he had lost his head. “You thought that?” “Don’t be nervous. Perhaps I couldn’t have sworn to it. I did not see him very close.” T. Tembarom puffed rapidly at his pipe, and only ejaculated, “Oh!” “Of course he’s dead. If he wasn’t,”--with a shrug of his shoulders,--“Lady Joan Fayre would be Lady Joan Temple Barholm, and the pair would be bringing up an interesting family here.” He looked about the room, and then, as if suddenly recalling the fact, added, “By George! you’d be selling newspapers, or making them--which was it?--in New York!” It was by no means unpleasing to see that he had made his hit there. T. Tembarom swung about and walked across the room with a very perturbed expression. “Say,” he put it to him, coming back, “are you in earnest, or are you just saying it to give me a jolt?” Palliser studied him. The American sharpness was not always so keen as it seemed. His face would have betrayed his uneasiness to the dullest onlooker. “Have you any objection to my seeing him in his own room?” Palliser inquired. “It does him harm to see people,” Tembarom said with nervous bruskness. “It worries him.” Palliser smiled a quiet, but far from agreeable, smile. He enjoyed what he put into it. “Quite so; best to keep him quiet,” he returned. “Do you know what my advice would be? Put him in a comfortable sanatorium. A lot of stupid investigations would end in nothing, of course, but they’d be a frightful bore.” He thought it extraordinarily stupid in T. Tembarom to come nearer to him with an eagerness entirely unconcealed, if he really knew what he was doing. “Are you sure that if you saw him close you’d _know_, so that you could swear to him?” he demanded. “You’re extremely nervous, aren’t you?” Palliser watched him with smiling coolness. “Of course Jem Temple Barholm is dead; but I’ve no doubt that if I saw this man of yours, I could swear he had remained dead--if I were asked.” “If you knew him well, you could make me sure. You could swear one way or another. I want to be _sure_,” said Tembarom. “So should I in your place; couldn’t be too sure. Well, since you ask me, I _could_ swear. I knew him well enough. He was one of my most intimate enemies. What do you say to letting me see him?” “I would if I could,” Tembarom replied, as if thinking it over. “I would if I could.” Palliser treated him to the far from pleasing smile again. “But it’s quite impossible at present?” he suggested. “Excitement is not good for him, and all that sort of thing. You want time to think it over.” Tembarom’s slowly uttered answer, spoken as if he were still considering the matter, was far from being the one he had expected. “I want time; but that’s not the reason you can’t see him right now. You can’t see him because he’s not here. He’s gone.”