Ricardo leaned with careful artistry against the wall.

“Now, what has this room to say to me?” he asked importantly.  Nobody paid the slightest attention to his question, and it was just as well.  For the room had very little information to give him.  He ran his eye over the white Louis Seize furniture, the white panels of the wall, the polished floor, the pink curtains.  Even the delicate tracery of the ceiling did not escape his scrutiny.  Yet he saw nothing likely to help him but an overturned chair and a couple of crushed cushions on a settee.  It was very annoying, all the more annoying because M. Hanaud was so uncommonly busy.  Hanaud looked carefully at the long settee and the crumpled cushions, and he took out his measure and measured the distance between the cushion at one end and the cushion at the other.  He examined the table, he measured the distance between the chairs.  He came to the fireplace and raked in the ashes of the burnt-out fire.  But Ricardo noticed a singular thing.  In the midst of his search Hanaud’s eyes were always straying back to the settee, and always with a look of extreme perplexity, as if he read there something, definitely something, but something which he could not explain.  Finally he went back to it; he drew it farther away from the wall, and suddenly with a little cry he stooped and went down on his knees.  When he rose he was holding some torn fragments of paper in his hand.  He went over to the writing-table and opened the blotting-book.  Where it fell open there were some sheets of note-paper, and one particular sheet of which half had been torn off.  He compared the pieces which he held with that torn sheet, and seemed satisfied.

There was a rack for note-paper upon the table, and from it he took a stiff card.

“Get me some gum or paste, and quickly,” he said.  His voice had become brusque, the politeness had gone from his address.  He carried the card and the fragments of paper to the round table.  There he sat down and, with infinite patience, gummed the fragments on to the card, fitting them together like the pieces of a Chinese puzzle.

The others over his shoulders could see spaced words, written in pencil, taking shape as a sentence upon the card.  Hanaud turned abruptly in his seat toward Wethermill.

“You have, no doubt, a letter written by Mlle. Celie?”

Wethermill took his letter-case from his pocket and a letter out of the case.  He hesitated for a moment as he glanced over what was written.  The four sheets were covered.  He folded back the letter, so that only the two inner sheets were visible, and handed it to Hanaud.  Hanaud compared it with the handwriting upon the card.

“Look!” he said at length, and the three men gathered behind him.  On the card the gummed fragments of paper revealed a sentence: 

“Je ne sais pas.”

“‘I do not know,’” said Ricardo; “now this is very important.”