“Such a dreadful thing has come to me,” she cried, even before Kennedy could ask her what the trouble was.

From her handbag she drew out a crumpled, dirty piece of paper in an envelope.

“It came in the first mail,” she explained.  “I could not wait to send it to you.  I brought it myself.  What can it mean?”

Kennedy unfolded the paper.  Printed in large characters, in every way similar to the four warnings that had been sent to us, was just one ominous line.  We read: 

“Beware the man who professes to be a friend of your father.”

I glanced from the note to Kennedy, then to Inez.  One name was in my mind, and before I knew it I had spoken it.

“Lockwood?” I queried inadvertently.

Her eyes met mine in sharp defiance.  “Impossible,” she exclaimed.  “It is some one trying to injure him with me.  Beware of Mr. Lockwood?  How absurd!”

Yet it must have meant Lockwood.  No one else could have been meant.  It was he, most of all, who might be called a friend of her father.  She seemed to see the implication without a word from us.

I could not help sympathizing with the brave girl in her struggle between the attack against Lockwood and her love and confidence in him.  It did not need words to tell me that evidence must be overwhelming to convince her that her lover might be involved in any manner.

IX

THE PAPER FIBRES

Kennedy examined the anonymous letter carefully for several minutes, while we watched him in silence.

“Too clever to use a typewriter,” he remarked, still regarding the note through the lens of a hand-glass.  “Almost any one would have used a machine.  That would have been due to the erroneous idea that typewriting cannot be detected.  The fact is that the typewriter is perhaps a worse means of concealing identity than is disguised handwriting, especially printing like this.  It doesn’t afford the effective protection to the criminal that one supposes.  On the contrary, the typewriting of such a note may be the direct means by which it can be traced to its source.  We can determine what kind of machine it was done with, then what particular machine was used can be identified.”

He paused and indicated a number of little instruments which he had taken from a drawer and laid on the table, as he tore off a bit of the corner of the sheet of paper and examined it.

“There is one thing I can do now, though,” he continued.  “I can study the quality of the paper in this sheet.  If it were only torn like those warnings we have already received, it might perhaps be mated with another piece as accurately as if the act had been performed before our eyes.”

He picked up a little instrument with a small curved arm and a finely threaded screw that brought the two flat surfaces of the arm and the end of the screw together.