It contained a loaf of bread, a tinned tongue, and two tins of preserved peaches.

As I set it down again, after having examined it, my heart leaped to see that beneath it there lay a sheet of paper with writing upon it.

I raised it, and this was what I read, roughly scrawled in pencil:-- Dr.Watson has gone to Coombe Tracey.
For a minute I stood there with the paper in my hands thinking out the meaning of this curt message.

It was I, then, and not Sir Henry, who was being dogged by this secret man.

He had not followed me himself, but he had set an agent--the boy, perhaps--upon my track, and this was his report.