Mr. Davager had taken one of the best bedrooms at the Gatliffe Arms.  Floor carpeted all over, walls beautifully papered, four-poster, and general furniture first-rate.  I searched, to begin with, on the usual plan, examining everything in every possible way, and taking more than an hour about it.  No discovery.  Then I pulled out a carpenter’s rule which I had brought with me.  Was there anything in the room which—­either in inches, feet, or yards—­answered to “5 along” and “4 across”?  Nothing.  I put the rule back in my pocket—­measurement was no good, evidently.  Was there anything in the room that would count up to 5 one way and 4 another, seeing that nothing would measure up to it?  I had got obstinately persuaded by this time that the letter must be in the room—­principally because of the trouble I had had in looking after it.  And persuading myself of that, I took it into my head next, just as obstinately, that “5 along” and “4 across” must be the right clew to find the letter by—­principally because I hadn’t left myself, after all my searching and thinking, even so much as the ghost of another guide to go by.  “Five along”—­where could I count five along the room, in any part of it?

Not on the paper.  The pattern there was pillars of trellis-work and flowers, inclosing a plain green ground—­only four pillars along the wall and only two across.  The furniture?  There were not five chairs or five separate pieces of any furniture in the room altogether.  The fringes that hung from the cornice of the bed?  Plenty of them, at any rate!  Up I jumped on the counterpane, with my pen-knife in my hand.  Every way that “5 along” and “4 across” could be reckoned on those unlucky fringes I reckoned on them—­probed with my penknife—­scratched with my nails—­crunched with my fingers.  No use; not a sign of a letter; and the time was getting on—­oh, Lord! how the time did get on in Mr. Davager’s room that morning.

I jumped down from the bed, so desperate at my ill luck that I hardly cared whether anybody heard me or not.  Quite a little cloud of dust rose at my feet as they thumped on the carpet.

“Hullo!” thought I, “my friend the head chambermaid takes it easy here.  Nice state for a carpet to be in, in one of the best bedrooms at the Gatliffe Arms.”  Carpet!  I had been jumping up on the bed, and staring up at the walls, but I had never so much as given a glance down at the carpet.  Think of me pretending to be a lawyer, and not knowing how to look low enough!

The carpet!  It had been a stout article in its time, had evidently began in a drawing-room; then descended to a coffee-room; then gone upstairs altogether to a bedroom.  The ground was brown, and the pattern was bunches of leaves and roses speckled over the ground at regular distances.  I reckoned up the bunches.  Ten along the room—­eight across it.  When I had stepped out five one way and four the other, and was down on my knees on the center bunch, as true as I sit on this chair I could hear my own heart beating so loud that it quite frightened me.