"They will be known by and by," I answered prudently. And after that I did not think it wise to speak farther, lest I should give more than I got; but as soon as he had finished, and we had washed our hands, I led him to the closet looking on the river, where I was in the habit of working with my secretaries. I sent them away and sat down with him to his accounts; but in the position in which I found myself, between suspicion and perplexity, I could so little command my attention that I gathered nothing from their items; and had I found another doing the King's service as negligently I had certainly sent him about his business. Nevertheless I made some show of auditing them, and had reached the last roll when something in the fairly written summary, which closed the account, caught my eye. I bent more closely over it, and presently making an occasion to carry the parchment into the next room, compared it with the handwriting on the scrap of paper I had found in the snowball. A brief scrutiny showed me that they were the work of the same person! [Illustration: "YOUR SCRIBE MIGHT DO FOR ME." _Page 23_.] I went back to M. Nicholas, and after attesting the accounts, and making one or two notes, remarked in a careless way on the clearness of the hand. "I am badly in need of a fourth secretary," I added. "Your scribe might do for me." It did not escape me that once again M. Nicholas looked uncomfortable, his red face taking a deeper tinge and his hand going nervously to his pointed gray beard, "I do not think he would do for you," he answered. "What is his name?" I asked, purposely bending over the papers and avoiding his eyes. "I have dismissed him," he rejoined curtly. "I do not know where he could now be found." "That is a pity--he writes well," I answered, as if it were nothing but a whim that led me to pursue the subject. "And good clerks are scarce. What was his name?" "Felix," he said reluctantly. I had now all I wanted. Accordingly I spoke of another matter and shortly afterward Nicholas rose and went. But he left me in a fever of doubt and suspicion; so that for nearly half an hour I walked up and down the room, unable to decide whether I should treat the warning of the snowball with contempt, as the work of a discharged servant, or on that very account attach the more credit to it. By and by I remembered that the last sheet of the roll I had audited bore date the previous day; whence it was clear that Felix had been dismissed within the last twenty-four hours, and perhaps after the delivery of his note to me. Such a coincidence, which seemed no less pertinent than strange, opened a wide field for conjecture; and the possibility that Nicholas had really called on me to sound me and learn what I knew presently occurring to my mind, brought me to a final determination to seek out this Felix, and without the delay of an hour sift the matter to the bottom.