“I’d thank you to come with me,” she said stiffly.

“Come where?”

“To the telephone.”

I groaned inwardly.  But, because submission to Maggie’s tyranny has become a firm habit with me, I rose.  I saw then that she held a dingy quarter in one hand.

Without a word she turned and stalked ahead of me into the hall.  It is curious, looking back and remembering that she had then no knowledge of the significance of things, to remember how hard and inexorable her back was.  Viewed through the light of what followed, I have never been able to visualize Maggie moving down the hall.  It has always been a menacing figure, rather shadowy than real.  And the hail itself takes on grotesque proportions, becomes inordinately long, an infinity of hall, fading away into time and distance.

Yet it was only a moment, of course, until I stood by the telephone.  Maggie had been at work.  The wooden box which covered the battery-jars had been removed, and lay on its side.  The battery-jars were uncovered, giving an effect of mystery unveiled, a sort of shamelessness, of destroyed illusion.

Maggie pointed.  “There’s a paper under one of the jars,” she said.  “I haven’t touched it, but I know well enough what it is.”

I have not questioned Maggie on this point, but I am convinced that she expected to find a sort of final summons, of death’s visiting-card, for one or the other of us.

The paper was there, a small folded scrap, partially concealed under a jar.

“Them prints was there, too,” Maggie said, non-committally.

The box had accumulated the flocculent floating particles of months, possibly years—­lint from the hall carpet giving it a reddish tinge.  And in this light and evanescent deposit, fluttered by a breath, fingers had moved, searched, I am tempted to say groped, although the word seems absurd for anything so small.  The imprint of Maggie’s coin and of her attempts at salvage were at the edge and quite distinct from the others.

I lifted the jar and picked up the paper.  It was folded and refolded until it was not much larger than a thumb-nail, a rather stiff paper crossed with faint blue lines.  I am not sure that I would have opened it—­it had been so plainly in hiding, and was so obviously not my affair—­had not Maggie suddenly gasped and implored me not to look at it.  I immediately determined to examine it.

Yet, after I had read it twice, it had hardly made an impression on my mind.  There are some things so incredible that the brain automatically rejects them.  I looked at the paper.  I read it with my eyes.  But I did not grasp it.

It was not note paper.  It was apparently torn from a tablet of glazed and ruled paper—­just such paper, for instance, as Maggie soaks in brandy and places on top of her jelly before tying it up.  It had been raggedly torn.  The scrap was the full width of the sheet, but only three inches or so deep.  It was undated, and this is what it said: