“I have letters in my pocket which will serve to identify me,” replied the Professor shortly.

He put his hand in his pocket and produced a packet of papers. The man took them, glanced through them and handed them back. “I beg your pardon, sir,” he said respectfully. “But⁠—I didn’t know you without your hair, and with your face blackened like that. Perhaps you could tell us who this is, sir?”

He flashed his lamp upon the features of the figure lying upon the floor. The Professor leant forward in his chair and gazed at them in silence. This man, too, was hairless as he was himself, as though he had been shaved by some expert barber. Beneath the grime which covered his face, beneath the lines which age and suffering had graven upon him, the Professor recognized the features which had graven themselves upon his memory so many years ago. He saw again the prisoner in the dock, the handsome clean-shaven face with its look of awful anxiety. And he knew where he had seen before those eyes which had stared into his before he had lost consciousness.