"You will not need to change your pants, I think," said the costumer. "Throw off your coat—here is one that will button close and hide your vest, and I think you will find it about your size. Yours is a gray—this is a dark brown and rather a genteel garment, and will suit the gray pants."
Leslie threw off his coat and put on the brown substitute, which fitted him very respectably.
"That is enough in the way of clothes, I should think," remarked the costumer, "unless you should be dodging a very sharp woman, or one of Kennedy's men."
"It is a sharp woman I am trying to dodge," said Leslie, with a laugh, "but I think she will know very little about my clothes. The face—the face is the thing! Make me up so that you don't know me—so that I won't know myself—so that my wife, if I had one, would scream for a policeman if I attempted to kiss her."
"Yes, the face—that is what we are coming to," replied the costumer. "You have a moustache already. That we cannot very well cut off, I suppose."
"Not if I know it!" graphically but somewhat inelegantly said Tom, who had one of his many prides hidden away somewhere in the flowing sweep of that ornament to the upper lip.
"Then we must gray it!" said the costumer. "No objection to looking a little older?"
"Make me as old as Dr. Parr or old Galen's head, if you like," was the answer. "Only be quick, for the sauciest and best-looking girl in New York is waiting for me."
"To run away and be married? eh?" asked the costumer, as he went to a shelf and took down a cup of some preparation very like paint, and with it a brush. "None of my business, though! Hold still, and never mind the smell. It will be dry in two minutes, and water will not touch it, but you can clean it out at once with turpentine." He applied the mixture to Leslie's moustache, the member over it being drawn up considerably at times as if the bouquet of one of Hackley's summer gutters was rising; but in less than two minutes, as the costumer had said, the smell ceased, the mixture was dry, and Tom Leslie had a moustache grayish-white enough to have belonged to Sulpizio.
"Beautiful!" said the costumer, handing the subject a small mirror from the wall. "The hair and beard directly. Now for a complexion old enough to suit such a facial ornament." In a moment, he had a small cup of brown paint, with a camel's-hair brush, and was operating on Leslie's forehead and cheeks, artistically throwing in a few wrinkles on the former and neatly executed crows-feet under the eyes, in water-colors that dried as soon as applied. Leslie, by the aid of a glass, saw himself getting old, a little more plainly than most of us recognize the ravages made on our faces by time.