A letter addressed to Pesca represented the surest measure of precaution which it was now possible for me to take.  I wrote as follows—­

“The man whom I pointed out to you at the Opera is a member of the Brotherhood, and has been false to his trust.  Put both these assertions to the test instantly.  You know the name he goes by in England.  His address is No. 5 Forest Road, St. John’s Wood.  On the love you once bore me, use the power entrusted to you without mercy and without delay against that man.  I have risked all and lost all—­and the forfeit of my failure has been paid with my life.”

I signed and dated these lines, enclosed them in an envelope, and sealed it up.  On the outside I wrote this direction:  “Keep the enclosure unopened until nine o’clock to-morrow morning.  If you do not hear from me, or see me, before that time, break the seal when the clock strikes, and read the contents.”  I added my initials, and protected the whole by enclosing it in a second sealed envelope, addressed to Pesca at his lodgings.

Nothing remained to be done after this but to find the means of sending my letter to its destination immediately.  I should then have accomplished all that lay in my power.  If anything happened to me in the Count’s house, I had now provided for his answering it with his life.

That the means of preventing his escape, under any circumstances whatever, were at Pesca’s disposal, if he chose to exert them, I did not for an instant doubt.  The extraordinary anxiety which he had expressed to remain unenlightened as to the Count’s identity—­ or, in other words, to be left uncertain enough about facts to justify him to his own conscience in remaining passive—­betrayed plainly that the means of exercising the terrible justice of the Brotherhood were ready to his hand, although, as a naturally humane man, he had shrunk from plainly saying as much in my presence.  The deadly certainty with which the vengeance of foreign political societies can hunt down a traitor to the cause, hide himself where he may, had been too often exemplified, even in my superficial experience, to allow of any doubt.  Considering the subject only as a reader of newspapers, cases recurred to my memory, both in London and in Paris, of foreigners found stabbed in the streets, whose assassins could never be traced—­of bodies and parts of bodies thrown into the Thames and the Seine, by hands that could never be discovered—­of deaths by secret violence which could only be accounted for in one way.  I have disguised nothing relating to myself in these pages, and I do not disguise here that I believed I had written Count Fosco’s death-warrant, if the fatal emergency happened which authorised Pesca to open my enclosure.