The next instant the body had disappeared, and I heard a scraping noise, apparently on the outside wall. I rushed to the window and drew aside the blind. The casement was certainly open, but then I had left it so. I put out my head and looked carefully over the garden. Not a movement anywhere, not a sound. I waited for a time, but nothing more happened, and then I went to bed again, first, I confess, closing and fastening the window; and in a little the whole incident was lost in oblivion.
With the prosaic entry of daylight and a servant to fill my bath, I began to wonder whether the whole thing was not a dream, and, in fact, I had almost persuaded myself that this was the case when I spied, lying on the floor below the window, a slip of paper. It was folded and addressed in pencil to “M. d'Haricot, confidential.” I opened it and read these words:
“Beware how you betray! Lumme also is watched. Therefore be faithful, if it is not too late!”
“What the devil!” I said to myself, after reading these incomprehensible words two or three times. “Is this a practical joke—or can it be from—?” I hastily turned the scrap over, looked at it upside down, and against the light, but no, there was no mark to give me a clew.
So meaningless did the warning seem that before the day was far spent it had ceased to trouble me.
