"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. Everything successfully carried out. Muffled clapper. Must see you. Utmost importance.