ompanied by a match-case _en suite_, to a tiny jewelled inlaid holder
bearing a half-smoked cigarette in it. Cleek picked it up, smelt it,
smelt it again, and then pursed his lips up into a low whistle of
astonishment.

"My lady indulges in a delicate drug now and again, does she?" he told
himself, examining the thing with some distaste. "And for that reason
one may find excuse for the hysteria of this morning. That lends fresh
colour to the case, certainly. For a drug-fiend in plain parlance is
little more than a fool, and a half-balanced fool at that.... I'll take
a peep at those drawers in that secretaire, my lady, and see if you have
anything to reveal to me. For an _ambitious_ drug-fiend would stop at
nothing to gain her own ends, and if those same ends should happen to be
such a heritage as _this_ for her son and herself.... Hello! what's
this? Tablets, eh? But the bottle unmarked."

He drew one out of the little phial and laid it in the palm of his hand,
and with the other thumb as piston, ground it down to fine powder and
then, sniffed it, recollecting that story which Maud Duggan had told him
of her suspicions with regard to the poisoning of her father. But after
he had touched the tip of his tongue to it, he smiled a little.

"H'm. Nothing but aspirin. I thought as much, certainly, when she told
me the story. So that explodes _that_ little theory once and for all--if
there was anything in it from the beginning.... Nicely appointed
chamber, I must say." He walked leisurely about it, lifting a pillow
there, and dropping it back into its place, and straightening the set of
a chair, pushed out of its usual position by a very obvious hurry of the
room's occupant.

And he was just in the act of doing this trivial thing when he came upon
a little screw of paper lying in a twisted ball beneath a chair which
stood close up to the Turkish stool, and evidently dropped by accident
(which undoubtedly was the fact). Cleek stooped to pick it up, smoothed
it out in his fingers, and then of a sudden sucked in his breath, and
every muscle in that well-organized frame of his went taut as iron. For
the paper--innocent as it looked--contained news which certainly was
enough to startle the most unsuspicious police-constable in existence.
For, written across its surface, having neither name nor address nor
date, and in a calligraphy which was undoubtedly foreign, were the
words:

Meet me at three o'clock by the G. F. Road.