“Certainly, with the exception of the nails and the hair!”
A week later the Professor was found dead in his laboratory.... There were reports of suicide—hushed up. People said he had been more eccentric than ever of late, and theorized about brain-mischief; only I located the trouble in the heart. A year went by, and I had almost forgotten Lady Clanbevan—for she went abroad after the Professor’s death—when at a little watering-place on the Dorset coast, I saw that lovely thing, as lovely as ever—she who was fifty if a day! With her were the blue-cloaked elderly nurse and Lord Clanbevan, borne, as usual, in the arms of his attendant, or wheeled in a luxurious perambulator. Day after day I encountered them—the lovely mother, the middle-aged nurse, and the mysterious child—until the sight began to get on my nerves. Had the Professor selected me as the recipient of a secret unrivaled in the records of biological discovery, or had he been the victim of some maniacal delusion that cold October day when we met in Rotten Row? One peep under the thick white lace veil with which the baby’s face was invariably covered would clear everything up! Oh! for a chance to allay the pangs of curiosity!
The chance came. It was a hot, waspy August forenoon. Everybody was indoors with all the doors and windows open, lunching upon the innutritive viands alone procurable at health resorts—everybody but myself, Lord Clanbevan, and his nurse. She had fallen asleep upon a green-painted esplanade seat, gratuitously shielded by a striped awning. Lord Clanbevan’s C-springed, white-hooded, cane-built perambulator stood close beside her. He was, as usual, a mass of embroidered cambric and cashmere, and, as always, thickly veiled, his regular breathing heaved his infant breast; the thick white lace drapery attached to his beribboned bonnet obscured the features upon which I so ardently longed to gaze! It was the chance, as I have said; and as the head of the blue-cloaked nurse dropped reassuringly upon her breast, as she emitted the snore that gave assurance of the soundness of her slumbers, I stepped silently on the gravel towards the baby’s perambulator. Three seconds, and I stood over its apparently sleeping inmate; another, and I had lifted the veil from the face of the mystery—and dropped it with a stifled cry of horror!
The child had a moustache!
THE DUCHESS’S DILEMMA
“A person called to see me!” repeated the Duchess of Rantorlie. “He pleaded urgent business, you say?”
She glanced at the card presented by her groom-of-the-chambers without taking the trouble to lift it from the salver. “‘Mr. Moss Rubelius.’ I do not know the name—I have no knowledge of any urgent business. You must tell him to go away at once, and not call again.”
“Begging your Grace’s pardon,” remarked the official, “the person seemed to anticipate a message of the kind——”
“Did he? Then,” thought her Grace, “he is not disappointed.”
“And, still begging your Grace’s pardon,” pursued the discreet domestic, “he asked me to hand this second card to your Grace.”