Then Dick looked vexed. He remembered that Rob had been at Dome Castle on the previous Christmas Eve.
'Look here, Angus,' he said bluntly, 'this is a matter I hate to talk about. The fact is, however, that this is the real Sir Clement. The fellow you met was an impostor, who came from no one knows where. Unfortunately, he has returned to the same place.'
Dick bit his lip while Rob digested this.
'But if you know the real Dowton,' Rob asked, 'how were you deceived?'
'Well, it was my father who was deceived rather than myself, but we did not know the real baronet then. The other fellow, if you must know, traded on his likeness to Dowton, who is in the country now for the first time for many years. Whoever the impostor is, he is a humorist in his way, for when he left the castle in January he asked my father to call on him when he came to town. The fellow must have known that Dowton was coming home about that time; at all events, my father, who was in London shortly afterwards, looked up his friend the baronet, as he thought, at his club, and found that he had never set eyes on him before. It would make a delicious article if it had not happened in one's own family.'
'The real Sir Clement seems great friends with Miss Abinger,' Rob could not help saying.
'Yes,' said Dick, 'we struck up an intimacy with him over the affair, and stranger things have happened than that he and Mary——'
He stopped.
'My father, I believe, would like it,' he added carelessly, but Rob had turned away. Dick went after him.
'I have told you this,' he said, 'because, as you knew the other man, it had to be done, but we don't like it spoken of.'