With a leisurely movement he at length rose and went to the window, threw up the sash, and peered out into the half-darkness of the street. He ran his eye up and down Chancery Lane, and noted that all the lights except the street-lamps were out, and that the pavements were bare of human forms, save for one or two dark-flitting, shadowy beings. "It will soon be time," he thought; and he closed the window. He sat down again, and proceeded to smoke a third pipe. All the while he had been going over the details of his scheme; now he was thinking whether he had not been too abrupt in making the suggestion that he might take a holiday to Williamson. "What does it matter?" he concluded; "he knows nothing." He smoked on until twelve boomed through the air--the strokes came in a great volume of sound from the clocks in the Strand and from far and near. When it had died away, he put down his pipe, and walked into his bedroom. But it was not to go to bed. For, a few minutes later, a figure emerged from Cooper Silwood's bedroom--the figure of a man of the height and general build of Cooper Silwood, but otherwise not like him in the least. Yet it was he, though changed beyond recognition. His mien was that of a respectable workman in his everyday clothes. They were such clothes as might be worn by men of half a dozen different trades with equal appropriateness, so little distinctive of any one trade were they, and yet they stamped themselves unmistakably as a workman's clothes. Silwood wore them like one who was thoroughly at home in them; he moved at ease in them. To all appearance he was a workman, and from his bearing it might be guessed that the part he was playing was no new one. To be in this disguise was no novelty to him. That it was no new _rôle_ for him to assume was also manifest from the skill and success with which his face was made up. To begin with, the heavy brown wig he usually had on his head had disappeared, and he was now quite bald, with the exception of a narrow fringe of dark-grey hair round the base of the skull. He was no longer clean-shaven; an untidy blackish moustache covered his upper lip. A dark line had been pencilled on either side of his nose, these lines alone imparting to the face a marvellous change in its expression. Besides, the skin of the face had been slightly stained, as had also been that of the hands. His disguise was absolute. His own mother, as the phrase goes, would not have known him. He looked to the life the part he was playing. Mr. Cooper Silwood, the eminent solicitor, had disappeared, and a sober, respectable workman had taken his place. Could Francis Eversleigh now have seen this partner of his he would have had much food for thought; if he could have followed him he would have had much more.