Returning to the salon, where the main body of his collection was assembled, he moved slowly from object to object, ticking off items and noting their condition; with the sole result of justifying his first conclusion, that whereas nothing had escaped handling, nothing had been removed.
By way of a final test, he opened his desk (of which the lock had been deftly picked) and went through its pigeon-holes.
His scanty correspondence, composed chiefly of letters exchanged with art dealers, had been scrutinized and replaced carelessly, in disorder: and here again he missed nothing; but in the end, removing a small drawer and inserting a hand in its socket, he dislodged a rack of pigeon-holes and exposed the secret cabinet that is almost inevitably an attribute of such pieces of period furniture.
A shallow box, this secret space contained one thing only, but that one of considerable value, being the leather bill-fold in which the adventurer kept a store of ready money against emergencies.
It was mostly for this, indeed, that he had come to his apartment; his London campaign having demanded an expenditure far beyond his calculations, so that he had landed in Paris with less than one hundred francs in pocket. And Lanyard, for all his pride of spirit, acknowledged one haunting fear that of finding himself strapped in the face of emergency.
The fold yielded up its hoard to a sou: Lanyard counted out five notes of one thousand francs and ten of twenty pounds: their sum, upwards of two thousand dollars.
But if nothing had been abstracted, something had been added: the back of one of the Bank of England notes had been used as a blank for memorandum.
Lanyard spread it out and studied it attentively.
The handwriting had been traced with no discernible attempt at disguise, but was quite strange to him. The pen employed had been one of those needle-pointed nibs so popular in France; the hand was that of an educated Frenchman. The import of the memorandum translated substantially as follows:
"To the Lone Wolf— "The Pack sends Greetings "and extends its invitation "to participate in the benefits "of its Fraternity. "One awaits him always at "L'Abbaye Thêléme."