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 strings. Oh, it was a famous day that kept us at the Hôtel de Lille!"

He said this quite unconcerned, and not a bit ready to argue the point out with me. It was all very well for him to glide over it in that easy way, but what I wanted to know was, where had Michel Grey first heard talk about us? That the gossip was new to him was evident from the fact that he played billiards with my master the very first night he came to Paris. What chatter he had heard was heard between supper that evening and breakfast two days after. And this was what troubled me, even in the face of Sir Nicolas' tale about him taking drugs and forget- ting. "There's danger moving," I thought, "and if you're married within the month, Nicky, I'm a Chinaman."

This is how the thing looked to me, then and for days after. While, on the one hand, Michel Grey talked no more, either to me or to Sir Nicolas, of his suspicions, on the other hand, I could see that he would have no truck with us, and was doing his best to make his sister think as he did. That he did not succeed in this is to be set down to many things, but above all to the fact that for days together he would hang about the hotel like a man without a mind; and was, as all the world could see, tottering fast to his grave. What drug he drank, or where he learned the habit, no man could say, but a more pitiable spectacle than he made, looking for all the world like a blind thing come out of a coffin, I hope never to see.