wife. There are strange doings at the seaside. If you don't believe me,
ask Mrs. Turner, Number 1, Slains Row, Ramsgate."

No address, no date, no signature--an anonymous letter, the first he
had ever received in the long course of his life.

His hard brain was in no way affected by the liquor that he had drunk.
He sat down on his bed, mechanically folding and refolding the letter.
The reference to "Mrs. Turner" produced no impression on him of any
sort: no person of that name, common as it was, happened to be numbered
on the list of his friends or his customers. But for one circumstance,
he would have thrown the letter aside, in contempt. His memory reverted
to his wife's incomprehensible behaviour at parting. Addressing him
through that remembrance, the anonymous warning assumed a certain
importance to his mind. He went down to his desk, in the back office,
and took his wife's letter out of the drawer, and read it through
slowly. "Ha!" he said, pausing as he came across the sentence which
requested him to write beforehand, in the unlikely event of his
deciding to go to Ramsgate. He thought again of the strangely
persistent way in which his wife had dwelt on his trusting her; he
recalled her nervous anxious looks, her deepening colour, her agitation
at one moment, and then her sudden silence and sudden retreat to the
cab. Fed by these irritating influences, the inbred suspicion in his
nature began to take fire slowly. She might be innocent enough in
asking him to give her notice before he joined her at the seaside--she
might naturally be anxious to omit no needful preparation for his
comfort. Still, he didn't like it; no, he didn't like it. An appearance
as of a slow collapse passed little by little over his rugged wrinkled
face. He looked many years older than his age, as he sat at the desk,
with the flaring candlelight close in front of him, thinking. The