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instantly, even before I had them in my hand, before I looked at them.

“I got these four notes during the course of rehearsals,” she said. “Of course, you get all kinds of mash notes just as soon as you appear before the public—in fact, your success can sometimes be measured by the number of notes you receive from people who call themselves ‘Unknown Admirer,’ or other names of that kind—and sometimes they threaten all sorts of things if you do not respond to their affection. These things never come to pass, you know, so we seldom pay much attention to the notes. These notes, however, are sort of peculiar, and once or twice I was on the point of mentioning them to Ike Humbert, but we were so busy that I let the matter slip up. Read them, and see if you can make anything out of them.”

I glanced at the notes and recognized them instantly, of course. They were the same as the others —from the same hand, rather. They were written by the same typewriter, on half sheets of the same paper, and the phraseology bore a sort of family resemblance to the notes with which I was already familiar. The first one read: