Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 44, No. 6, June 1999

Do not be astonished by his agitation or dismay. Keep calm in his presence. If he questions you, if he wants to know your reason for applying to him or what impels you to make that request, give him no explanation. Your replies must be confined to these brief formulas: “I have come to fetch what belongs to me. I don’t know you, I don’t know your name, but I am obliged to come to you like this. I must have my clasp returned to me. I must.”

I honestly believe that, if you have the firmness not to swerve from that attitude, whatever farce the man may play you will be completely successful. But the contest must be a short one, and the issue will depend solely on your confidence in yourself and your certainty of success. It will be a sort of match in which you must defeat your opponent in the first round. If you remain impassive, you will win. If you show hesitation or uneasiness, you can do nothing against him. He will escape you and regain the upper hand after a first moment of distress, and the game will be lost in a few minutes. There is no midway house between victory or... defeat.

In the latter event, you would be obliged — I beg you to pardon me for saying so — again to accept my collaboration. I offer it to you in advance, my dear, and without any conditions, while stating quite plainly that all that I have been able to do for you and all that I may yet do gives me no other right than that of thanking you and devoting myself more than ever to the woman who represents my joy, my whole life.

Hortense, after reading the letter, folded it up and put it away at the back of a drawer, saying, in a resolute voice, “I sha’n’t go.”

To begin with, although she had formerly attached some slight importance to this trinket, which she had regarded as a mascot, she felt very little interest in it now that the period of her trials was apparently at an end. She could not forget that figure eight, which was the serial number of the next adventure. To launch herself upon it meant taking up the interrupted chain, going back to Rénine and giving him a pledge which, with his powers of suggestion, he would know how to turn to account.

Two days before the fifth of December she was still in the same frame of mind. So she was on the morning of the fourth, but suddenly, without even having to contend against preliminary subterfuges, she ran out into the garden, cut three lengths of rush, plaited them as she used to do in her childhood, and at twelve o’clock had herself driven to the station. She was uplifted by an eager curiosity. She was unable to resist all the amusing and novel sensations which the adventure proposed by Rénine promised her. It was really too tempting. The jet necklace, the toque with the autumn leaves, the old woman with the silver rosary — how could she resist their mysterious appeal, and how could she refuse this opportunity of showing Rénine what she was capable of doing?

And then, after all, she said to herself, laughing, he’s summoning me to Paris. Now, eight o’clock is dangerous to me at a spot three hundred miles from Paris in that old deserted Château de Halingre, but nowhere else. The only clock that can strike the threatening hour is down there, under lock and key, a prisoner!