But I think you’ll come, all the same. And you will be right in coming, whatever you believe.
Ilse Dumont.
It was a foregone conclusion that he would go. He knew it before he had read half the note. And when he finished it he was certain.
Amused, his curiosity excited, grateful that the adventure had not yet entirely ended, he lighted a cigarette and looked impatiently at his watch.
It lacked half an hour of the appointed time and his exhilaration was steadily increasing.
He stuck the note into the frame of his mirror over the washstand with a vague idea that if anything 229 happened to him this would furnish a clue to his whereabouts.
Then he thought of the steward, but, although he had no reason to believe the girl who had written him, something within him made him ashamed to notify the steward as to where he was going. He ought to have done it; common prudence born of experience with Ilse Dumont suggested it. And yet he could not bring himself to do it; and exactly why, he did not understand.
One thing, however, he could do; and he did. He wrote a note to Captain West giving the Paris address of the Princess Mistchenka, and asked that the olive-wood box be delivered to her in case any accident befell him. This note he dropped into the mailbox at the end of the main corridor as he went out. A few minutes later he stood in an empty passageway outside a door numbered 623. He had a loaded automatic in his breast pocket, a cigarette between his fingers, and, on his agreeable features, a smile of anticipation—a smile in which amusement, incredulity, reckless humour, and a spice of malice were blended—the smile born of the drop of Irish sparkling like champagne in his singing veins.
And he turned the knob of door No. 623 and went in.
She was reading, curled up on her sofa under the electric bulb, a cigarette in one hand, a box of bonbons beside her.