Upon it, traced in ink that had become blurred and half-effaced by the rain, there appeared some words. As I read them they seemed to glow in letters of fire; they held me spell-bound.
I lost courage to pursue my cold, calm, reasonable deductions; a kind of hallucination came upon me—a mental picture of her tragic end—and I felt my reason reel.
A vertigo of terror seized me, as though the breath of destiny swept over my brow.
The card secured to the great wreath was my own—the one I had given Sybil on the first evening we had met in the Casino Garden—but the words written upon it amazed me. I stood breathless, dumbfounded, holding it between my trembling fingers, utterly unable to realise the truth.
A portion of the writing upon it was in a well-formed man’s hand, the remainder in a heavy calligraphy totally different. The rains had rendered the writing faint and brown, yet in the fast-falling gloom I was enabled to decipher that one side bore the inscription—
“From your heart-broken husband—Stuart.”
Then, turning it over, I read in a distinctly feminine hand the strange exhortation—
“Seek, and you may find.”
What did it mean? Was it an actual message to me from the grave? Did it not appear like a declaration from my dead love herself that some mysterious crime had been committed, and that she left its elucidation in my hands? I became lost in bewilderment.
The inscription, purporting to be written by myself, was not in my handwriting, and I was puzzled to divine its meaning. That it had been penned at a date prior to the mysterious woman’s words appeared certain, as the lines were almost obliterated. Yet on reflection I saw that this fact might be accounted for if that side of the card had been uppermost, and thus more exposed. But the mysterious words, “Seek, and you may find,” were written in a different ink, upon which the action of the weather had had but little effect. The exhortation stood out plainly before my wondering eyes. By whose hand had it been traced? True, it was not addressed personally to me, yet so ominous were the words that I could not rid myself of the conviction that they were meant as an appeal to me.