f the room, fell upon a
trumpery filigree card-rack of pasteboard, that hung dangling by a dirty
blue ribbon from a little brass knob just beneath the middle of the
mantelpiece. In this rack, which had three or four compartments, were
five or six visiting-cards and a solitary letter. This last was much
soiled and crumpled. It was torn nearly in two, across the middle, as if
a design, in the first instance, to tear it entirely up as worthless,
had been altered, or stayed, in the second. It had a large black seal,
bearing the D---- cipher very conspicuously, and was addressed, in a
diminutive female hand, to D----" the Minister, himself. It was thrust
carelessly, and even, as it seemed, contemptuously, into one of the
uppermost divisions of the rack.

"No sooner had I glanced at this letter than I concluded it to be that
of which I was in search. To be sure, it was, to all appearance,
radically different from the one of which the Prefect had read us so
minute a description. Here the seal was large and black, with the
D---- cipher, there it was small and red, with the ducal arms of the
S---- family. Here, the address, to the Minister, was diminutive and
feminine; there the superscription, to a certain royal personage, was
markedly bold and decided; the size alone formed a point of
correspondence. But, then, the radicalness of these differences, which
was excessive: the dirt; the soiled and torn condition of the paper, so
inconsistent with the true methodical habits of D----, and so suggestive
of a design to delude the beholder into an idea of the worthlessness of
the document,--these things, together with the hyperobtrusive situation
of this document, full in the view of every visitor, and thus exactly in
accordance with the conclusions to which I had previously arrived; these
things, I say, were strongly corroborative of suspicion, in one who came
with the intention to suspect.

"I protracted my visit as long as possible, and, while I maintained a
most animated discussion with the Minister upon a topic which I knew
well had never failed to interest and excite him, I kept my attention
really riveted upon the letter. In this examination, I committed to
memory its external appearance and arrangement in the rack; and also
fell, at length, upon a discovery which set at rest whatever trivial
doubt I might have entertained. In scrutinizing the edges of the paper,
I observed them to be more chafed than seemed necessary. They pre