“You mustn’t expect me to know everything; I can only go by the indications. But I should say that he really would have come back here as Davenant, perhaps about three weeks later, and settled down permanently at the Hatcheries; or perhaps even—he was a very remarkable man—he would have bought up Brotherhood’s bungalow. You see, he liked the place; he liked the company; the only thing he disliked was having to play golf badly, and that necessity disappeared, once he settled down as Davenant. A wig is a nuisance, but so is baldness. The last place where anybody would look for Mr. Brotherhood, last heard of on the way to Glasgow, would be Paston Whitchurch, where Mr. Brotherhood had lived.” “I’m afraid I’m very stupid,” said Gordon, “one of Nature’s Watsons, as I said yesterday. But what about all the silly little indications I found at the Hatcheries an hour ago? Do they back up your theory, or are they wide of the mark?” “It’s all according to schedule,” explained Carmichael, “but for a reason quite different from any you imagined. You must consider that the things we really find it hard to change are not the important things of life, our moral or religious or political standpoint, but our common, daily habits of living. Brotherhood might be an atheist, and Davenant a Catholic; Brotherhood a violent Radical, Davenant a Diehard Tory. But every man has his own preference in razors and in shaving-soap and in tooth-powder; and if you looked into the thing, you would find that if Davenant used A’s shaving-soap, so did Brotherhood; if Brotherhood used B’s tooth-powder, so did Davenant. There lay the real danger of detection. There was just the danger that somebody—shall we say, an interfering old don?—might hit upon the truth of the secret, and make investigations. Accordingly, those little traces must be obliterated. And they have been, for Davenant was careful to take them away with him. And so has the photograph, a photograph which, I suspect, had a duplicate in Brotherhood’s house—you see, neither Brotherhood nor Davenant could live without it.” “But the collars and the socks? Surely nobody is so intimately wedded to one particular type of collar——” “A blind. Davenant was to look as if he were packing up to go away, so he must take some clothes with him, not merely the shaving things.” “But the towel and the soap? Surely they were not necessary to complete the illusion?” “No, they are even more significant. Davenant—don’t you remember?—had rather darker eyebrows than Brotherhood. Quite easily done, of course, with paint. But you want something to wash it off with; and there are no corridors on the slow trains.” “Yes, but look here,” objected Reeves, “why did he want to take all these things away with him on Monday?—it was on Tuesday he was timed to disappear—or rather, actually on Wednesday: his sleeper was for Wednesday.”