Jo spread the clothes out on the table--a coat, waistcoat, and trousers
of fulled cloth, grey and bulky, and smelling of the loom and the
tailor's iron. Charley looked at them interestedly, then glanced at the
clothes he had on, the suit that had belonged to him last year--grave-
clothes.

He drew himself up as though rousing from a dream. "Come, Jo, clear out,
and you shall have your new habitant in a minute," he said. Portugais
left the room, and when he came back, Charley was dressed in the suit of
grey fulled cloth. It was loose, but comfortable, and save for the
refined face--on which a beard was growing now--and the eye-glass, he
might easily have passed for a farmer. When he put on the dog-skin fur
cap and a small muffler round his neck, it was the costume of the
habitant complete.

Yet it was no disguise, for it was part of the life that Charles Mallard,
once Charley Steele, should lead henceforth.

He turned to the door and opened it. "Good-bye, Portugais," he said.

Jo was startled. "Where are you going, M'sieu'?"

"To the village."

"What to do, M'sieu'?"

"Who knows?"

"You will come back?" Jo asked anxiously.