At eight that night I met Moore and we compared notes over our dinner. I told him about finding that my papers had been disturbed, and also that I had written to Mrs. Furneau. Then he told me his news. “Well, Clayton, I’ve taken a couple of rooms in the house that is back to back with your apartment house. It’s an old-fashioned place and I had no difficulty in getting the rooms. Unfortunately, as you’re way up on the eighth floor and I’m on the second in this place, we’ll have some trouble running that wire. I think as soon as we get through here we’d better get started on it. Then we can take care of the outdoor part of it later in the night.” We were sitting in a sort of cubicle against the wall, shut off from the others like it by the high wooden backs of the seats. Each table was lit by a softly shaded electric globe, which threw little light beyond the table, and the rest of the room was but dimly lit. In the middle of our conversation about our house-to-house wire, I looked up to order our coffee, and suddenly saw that the soft-footed Chinese boy was standing quite close to Moore, although beyond the end of the seat, so that I could only see his elbow. We had spoken in very low tones and I thought nothing about it at the time. But I had cause to remember that Chinese boy later on. A few moments later we left the restaurant separately and made our way by separate routes to Moore’s new rooms, to begin work on our private wire. It seemed like making defensive preparations in advance before declaring war. For even after Moore’s warning I failed to realize fully that, with our murderous visitor that night and the subsequent search of my papers, if such it was, war had already been declared—and not by us. Chapter V Our First Clew The house in which Moore had taken his rooms was of the ordinary brown-stone type and had once been occupied, presumably, by a single family. Now, owing to changes in the neighborhood and ever-mounting rents, it had been split up into apartments. The basement was occupied, he told me, by a grocer, his wife and two children. The first floor served as office and home for a young doctor, while the second floor had been subdivided into two smaller apartments of three rooms each, with a bathroom common to both, Of these two, the front apartment belonged to a returned soldier and his somewhat shrill-voiced French bride. Moore had rented the back part of this floor, consisting of a bedroom, a small kitchen and a living-room. The third floor was unoccupied, but was similar in design to the second.