“For my fortune was becoming bizarre, you know.  It was making me ridiculous even to myself.  I have told you but the salient incidents of it; I do not desire to weary you with the facts of the broken braces, the spurious two-franc piece, or the lost door-key.  But it is becoming sinister; it needed a counter-poise before it became so pronounced that nothing but sudden death would suffice.  The thief steals my watch and I am relieved; he is departing with my best wishes for his success; all promises well, till you arrive at the charge, with your comb erect, and seize him.  It is all of a piece.  Yes, I know it is funny, but it alarms me.  I offer it, therefore, my watch—­a sacrifice.  Perhaps it likes watches.  If so, I have got off cheaply, for, to tell the truth, it was not much of a watch.”

He raised the minute glass and drank, setting it down again with a flourish.

“And now I must be going,” he said.  “It is a strange story—­not?  But I don’t like it; I don’t like it at all.”

“Adieu,” said Cobb, rising also.  “I don’t think I’d worry, if I were you.  And I won’t interfere again.”

“On no account,” said Savinien, seriously.

Cobb watched him move away, plodding along the pavement heavily, huge and portentous.  The back of his head bulged above the collar, with no show of neck between.  He was comical and pathetic; he seemed too vast in mere flesh to be the sport of a thing so freakish as luck.  To think that such a bulk had a weak heart in it—­and that deeper still in its recesses there moved and suffered the soul of a poet!

“Queer yarn,” mused Cobb.

It was on the following morning, while Cobb was dressing, that the messenger arrived—­a little man in black, with a foot-rule sticking out of his coat-pocket.  He looked like an elderly man-servant who had descended to trade.  He had a letter for Cobb, addressed in Savinien’s pyrotechnic hand, and handed it to him without speaking.

“My dear friend,” it said, “I fear the worst.  On my return to my rooms here, the first thing I saw was my watch, reposing on my bedside table.  It appears that when I made my toilet in the morning I forgot to put it in my pocket.  The thief, after all, got nothing.  I am lost.  In despair, Your Cesar Savinien.”

“Yes?” said Cobb.  “You want an answer?” For the little artisan in black was waiting.

“An answer!” The other stared.  “But——­then monsieur does not know?”

“What?”

“He must have been going down to post that note when he had written it,” said the little man.  “We found it in his hand.”

“Eh?” Cobb almost recoiled in the shock of his surprise and horror.  “D’you mean to tell me that after all, he—­he is——­”

The little man in black uttered a professional sigh.  “The concierge found him in the morning,” he replied.  “It is said that he suffered from his heart, that poor Monsieur.”

“Good Lord!” said Cobb.