emained to be done after this but to find the means of sending
my letter to its destination immediately. I should then have
accomplished all that lay in my power. If anything happened to me in
the Count's house, I had now provided for his answering it with his
life.

That the means of preventing his escape, under any circumstances
whatever, were at Pesca's disposal, if he chose to exert them, I did
not for an instant doubt. The extraordinary anxiety which he had
expressed to remain unenlightened as to the Count's identity--or, in
other words, to be left uncertain enough about facts to justify him to
his own conscience in remaining passive--betrayed plainly that the
means of exercising the terrible justice of the Brotherhood were ready
to his hand, although, as a naturally humane man, he had shrunk from
plainly saying as much in my presence. The deadly certainty with which
the vengeance of foreign political societies can hunt down a traitor to
the cause, hide himself where he may, had been too often exemplified,
even in my superficial experience, to allow of any doubt. Considering
the subject only as a reader of newspapers, cases recurred to my
memory, both in London and in Paris, of foreigners found stabbed in the
streets, whose assassins could never be traced--of bodies and parts of
bodies thrown into the Thames and the Seine, by hands that could never
be discovered--of deaths by secret violence which could only be
accounted for in one way. I have disguised nothing relating to myself
in these pages, and I do not disguise here that I believed I had
written Count Fosco's death-warrant, if the fatal emergency happened
which authorised Pesca to open my enclosure.

I left my room to go down to the ground floor of the house, and speak
to the landlord about finding me a messenger. He happened to be
ascending the stairs at the time, and we met on the landing. His son, a
quick lad, was the messenger he proposed to me on hearing what I
wanted. We had the boy upstairs, and I gave him his directions. He
was to take the letter in a cab, to put it into Professor Pesca's own
hands, and to bring me back a line of acknowledgment from that
gentleman--returning in the cab, and keeping it at the door for my use.
It was then nearly half-past ten. I calculated that the boy might be
back in twenty minutes, and that I might drive to St. John's Wood, on
his return, in twenty minutes more.

When the lad had departed on his errand I