I laughed within myself. I was not impatient. No. I would wait and watch until I had secured ample proof. Then I had but to apply to the police, and the arrest would be made. He, Ernest Cameron, had murdered and robbed the poor boy who had admired me and with whom I had so foolishly flirted. Was it the attention I had allowed him to pay me that was primarily the cause of his assassination? Did the moral responsibility rest upon myself? That night, even though tired out, I slept but little. Times without number I tried in vain to solve the secret of that cipher message--or warning, was it?--written upon the table before the Grand Café. But neither the initial nor the word “tobacco” conveyed to me any meaning whatsoever. One fact seemed strange, namely, the reason that the ragged collector of cigar-ends should have searched for it, and, further, that the word written there should have been “tobacco.” Again, who was the shabby, wizen-faced individual who had also watched that table with such eagerness and expectancy? As I reflected I became impressed by the idea that the table itself was one of those known to be a notice-board of criminals, and therefore at night observation was kept upon it. The great Goron, that past-master in the detection of crime, had, I remembered, told me that in all the quarters of Paris, from the chic Avenue des Champs Elysées to the lower parts of Montmartre, there were certain tables at certain cafés used by thieves, burglars, and other such gentry for the exchange of messages, the dissemination of news, and the issue of warnings. Indeed, the correspondence on the café tables was found to be more rapid and far more secret, and to attract less attention than the insertion of paragraphs in the advertisement columns of the newspapers. Each gang of malefactors had, he told me, its own particular table in its own particular café, where any number could sit and read in silence the cipher notice or warning placed there without the risk of direct communication with his companions. Had this man whom I had fondly loved actually allied himself with some criminal band so that he knew their means of communication and was in possession of their cipher? It certainly seemed as though he had. But that was one of the points I intended to clear up before denouncing him to the police. Next morning I rose early, eager for activity, but there seemed no movement in the room adjoining mine. All three took their coffee in their bedrooms, and it was not until nearly eleven o’clock that I heard Keppel in conversation with the mysterious woman who had been my travelling-companion. “Ernest is running a great risk,” he was saying. “It’s quite unnecessary, to my mind. The police are everywhere on the alert, for word has of course come from Nice. If he does, unfortunately, fall into their hands, he’ll only have himself to blame.” “But surely you don’t anticipate such a thing?” she asked in genuine alarm.