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"What's in the wind is this," said I to myself when I got back to the hotel, "you've heard some gossip, my fine gentleman, and you want to get to the bottom of it. If it's true that a cousin of yours knew Sir Nicolas Steele in Dublin three years ago, then you'll write to him, and what you'll learn won't keep your sister at the Hôtel de Lille. Maybe that cousin is in Europe; more probably he's in America, which gives us a month. Any way, it's you that we've got to play, and the sooner we begin the better."

This was my thought, and yet, simple as it seemed, there was something happened later in the day which gave a new turn altogether to it. I'd been bothering my head with the matter all afternoon, making nothing new of it outside the fact that the danger signal had been rung, so to speak, when what would happen but that, just before seven o'clock, I met the man again, face to face, in the corridor of the hotel, and the sight of him fairly took my breath away. I shouldn't have called him a healthy person any time, but now his eyes were sunken away something dreadful to see—while his cheeks were hollow like the cheeks of one just got up from a fever bed. White as his face had been in the morning, the color of it in the afternoon was like a bit of plaster of Paris. And what was more than this was the way he walked, feeling his road with his hands, like a blind man, and staring before him as though he was frightened that every step he took might land him on nothing.