The Second Letter
I have, I confess, slightly misled the reader by my earlier chapter-headings. What I have been calling the second letter, and what I shall now, more honestly, call the fourth, came two days after our visit to Pall Mall, and it was by a considerable margin the most serious of the sequence.
It arrived at noon precisely, in the common post, with a Kensington postmark. That, by itself, I should have noted as a change in her method. It had been, until that morning, a point of the affair that the letters came by no recognised carrier. That she had now resorted to the ordinary Post Office suggested either that she was in too great a hurry to arrange otherwise, or that she wished, in this particular case, for the record of a postmark to exist. Holmes took the envelope from my hand with a single quick gesture, turned it over, and said: "She is now frightened. That is new."
He opened it. He read. Then, without speaking, he handed the letter to me, and walked across to the window, and stood with his back to the room.
I have the letter before me as I write. I give it here, with the usual reservations of confidence, because the public interest in its subject has long since been superseded by events which have made the private interest of no further consequence, and because the reader cannot otherwise follow what came next.
*To Mr. Sherlock Holmes.*
*At ten o'clock on Friday evening, a