For a full half-minute they looked contemplatively, eye to eye, at one another.
"Janoc?" said Clarke.
"That is my name for one moment, sare," said Janoc politely in a very peculiar though fluent English: "and the yours, sare?"
"Unless you have a very bad memory you know mine! How on earth come you to be here, Émile Janoc?"
"England is free country, sare," said Janoc with a shrug; "I see not the why I must render you account of movement. Only I tell you this time, because you are so singular familiarly with my name of family, you deceive yourself as to my little name. I have, it is true, a brother named Émile——"
Clarke looked with a hard eye at him. The resemblance, if they were two, was certainly very strong. Since it seemed all but impossible that Émile Janoc should be in England, he accepted the statement grudgingly.
"Perhaps you wouldn't mind letting me see your papers?" he asked.
Janoc bowed.
"That I will do with big pleasure, sare," he said, and produced a passport recently viséd in Holland, by which it appeared that his name was not Émile, but Gaston.
They parted with a bow on Janoc's side and a nod on Clarke's; but Clarke was puzzled.