“Well, that’s a good ’un!  Why not you?”

“Oh, it’ll be my turn soon!  Considering the intelligence of those scoundrels, there’s no reason why they should go on missing me.”

They waited an hour longer.  Then Perenna opened a window and threw back the shutter.

“I say, Alexandre, perhaps you’re not dead, but you’re certainly very green.”

Mazeroux gave a wry laugh: 

“Upon my word, Chief, I confess that I had a bad time of it when I was keeping watch while you were asleep.”

“Were you afraid?”

“To the roots of my hair.  I kept on thinking that something was going to happen.  But you, too, Chief, don’t look as if you had been enjoying yourself.  Were you also—­”

He interrupted himself, on seeing an expression of unbounded astonishment on Don Luis’s face.

“What’s the matter, Chief?”

“Look! ... on the table ... that letter—­”

He looked.  There was a letter on the writing-table, or, rather, a letter-card, the edges of which had been torn along the perforation marks; and they saw the outside of it, with the address, the stamp, and the postmarks.

“Did you put that there, Alexandre?”

“You’re joking, Chief.  You know it can only have been you.”

“It can only have been I ... and yet it was not I.”

“But then—­”

Don Luis took the letter-card and, on examining it, found that the address and the postmarks had been scratched out so as to make it impossible to read the name of the addressee or where he lived, but that the place of posting was quite clear, as was the date:  Paris, 4 January, 19—.

“So the letter is three and a half months old,” said Don Luis.

He turned to the inside of the letter.  It contained a dozen lines and he at once exclaimed: 

“Hippolyte Fauville’s signature!”

“And his handwriting,” observed Mazeroux.  “I can tell it at a glance.  There’s no mistake about that.  What does it all mean?  A letter written by Hippolyte Fauville three months before his death?”

Perenna read aloud: 

“MY DEAR OLD FRIEND: 

“I can only, alas, confirm what I wrote to you the other day:  the plot is thickening around me!  I do not yet know what their plan is and still less how they mean to put it into execution; but everything warns me that the end is at hand.  I can see it in her eyes.  How strangely she looks at me sometimes!

“Oh, the shame of it!  Who would ever have thought her capable of it?

“I am a very unhappy man, my dear friend.”

“And it’s signed Hippolyte Fauville,” Mazeroux continued, “and I declare to you that it’s actually in his hand ... written on the fourth of January of this year to a friend whose name we don’t know, though we shall dig him out somehow, that I’ll swear.  And this friend will certainly give us the proofs we want.”

Mazeroux was becoming excited.