They waited an hour longer. Then Perenna opened a window and threw back the shutter.
"I say, Alexandre, perhaps you're not dead, but you're certainly very green."
Mazeroux gave a wry laugh:
"Upon my word, Chief, I confess that I had a bad time of it when I was keeping watch while you were asleep."
"Were you afraid?"
"To the roots of my hair. I kept on thinking that something was going to happen. But you, too, Chief, don't look as if you had been enjoying yourself. Were you also"
He interrupted himself, on seeing an expression of unbounded astonishment on Don Luis's face.
"What's the matter, Chief?"
"Look!… on the table … that letter"
He looked. There was a letter on the writing-table, or, rather, a letter-card, the edges of which had been torn along the perforation marks; and they saw the outside of it, with the address, the stamp, and the postmarks.
"Did you put that there, Alexandre?"
"You're joking, Chief. You know it can only have been you."
"It can only have been I … and yet it was not I."
"But then"
Don Luis took the letter-card and, on examining it, found that the address and the postmarks had been scratched out so as to make it impossible to read the name of the addressee or where he lived, but that the place of posting was quite clear, as was the date: Paris, 4 January, 19—.
