Her hand on the table with its débris of crystal and porcelain and silver was steady: mine, taking the paper, trembled. I looked, and my soul blanched: my hands seemed to crumple and collapse about the flimsy paper. I fumbled at the flap. There was the same lining of green tissue, and the name embossed in tiny letters ... _Tissonier_ ... the Paris stationer from whom I had bought my stock! How could I have failed to notice this before? this fine baronial envelope and the tinted tissue lining which I liked because it gave to the sheer white linen an undertone of privacy symbolic of what an envelope should carry. “It’s my envelope! It’s one of my envelopes!” I faced Mildred’s eyes: and I was whole again, for in her own there was no withdrawal, no banal suspicion marring their bestowal. She spoke, and lightly: “Could there be some simple explanation?” “There must be.” She smiled: for she knew that my response proved I had understood the caress of her own thoughts. Oh, Mildred, how I loved you at that moment, how unbelievably pure stood your spirit in my mind, and how I quailed to think that these mists of blindness and blood should mar your dwelling in my life and the sweet entrance of my life in yours. “Let me see,” she was saying while I longed for peace ... peace with my love: “Let’s put our heads together.... It is my writing, forged. It is your envelope, stolen. We can dismiss the possibility of someone else just within our circle having my hand, and having gone to just that _papeterie_ in Paris for his correspondence paper. I suppose your stationery is accessible enough?” “It stands in an open pigeonhole in the base of my table.” “John, do you know anyone who knows both me and Philip ... some possible person?” I had to be equal to her coolness: this was the very wine of my love that she was perpetually in her moods and acts inspiring me to a new height of conduct. “I can think of no one. Of course, that remark is worthless: there might be such a person without my knowing it. But where would the motive be in stealing my envelope and forging your script upon it? The whole complex act strikes me as stupid: a gratuitous elaboration in no way fitting the simplicity of the murder. Just look, Mildred. A man announces, when he knows Mr. LaMotte to be alone, that he is the bearer of a message. He does not say, from whom. He would not be expected to say: for if the message is confidential, the name of the sender will not be transmitted over the telephone. What comes next? He is in the presence of his victim; if he has a letter at all, its purpose is already fulfilled in the act of handing it over. At that moment must come the blow. I can see a reason in his having forged your hand. Mr. LaMotte’s interest would be greater, opening the note. In his engrossment, the assassin would have an easier field for his work.”