“The Señor Zuniga of Washington society?”
“Yes.”
“Of course I was. You recognized me at first sight, and so also did Hereward, as I saw by your amazed looks, although afterwards you were both persuaded that you were only deceived by a very striking likeness.”
“Yes, we were. For we knew you as Mr. Ancillon, and believed the professional announcement that you had gone to California——”
“When my stage name loaned to another member of the troupe alone had gone.”
“But believing as we did, how could we imagine you to be identical with Señor Zuniga, the nephew of the P—— minister? Even now I cannot understand it.”
“But you will when I tell you the whole of my story, Lilith.”
“And you acted your part so well! When you were introduced to us you looked so sublimely indifferent and unconscious of ever having seen us before. And, besides, though you looked so nearly identical with Alfred Ancillon, there were really striking points of dissimilarity.”
Señor Zuniga broke into one of his wild laughs, and then said:
“Exactly! Precisely! There were striking points of dissimilarity. When I dropped my stage name and character, and took up my real ones, I made no coarse disguise of other colored hair or complexion. Not at all. I just gave the ends of my very peculiar and characteristic eyebrows a quarter of an inch’s twist upward instead of downward, with the aid of a camel’s hair brush and a little Indian ink, and the ends of my mustache a corresponding droop downward instead of upward, and the character of my countenance and expression was changed. This, with my ‘sublime unconsciousness’ of which you spoke, your prepossessed idea that I had gone to California, en route for Australia, together with the utter improbability that Alfred Ancillon, the strolling player, should have anything in common with Señor Zuniga, the nephew of the P—— minister, completed the illusion.”