Object
The Warning Note
An anonymous message that reaches Sir Henry at the Northumberland Hotel on his first London morning. Its one sentence, "As you value your life or your reason keep away from the moor", is built of words clipped from a newspaper and gummed onto a half-sheet, the word moor alone added in ink. Holmes reads in it a Times leading article cut with short-bladed nail-scissors, the work of an educated person posing as an uneducated one and writing in hurried agitation from a hotel.
Chapter V. Three Broken Threads
It takes its place among the run of small mysteries. The cut sheet of the Times that might have named its sender cannot be traced through any hotel waste-paper, and so another of Holmes's threads snaps.
Chapter XII. Death on the Moor
Chapter XV. A Retrospection
Explained in full: fearing her husband too greatly to write openly, Mrs. Stapleton cut and pasted the words and disguised the address, so as to warn Sir Henry without betraying Stapleton. A faint trace of white-jessamine scent on the paper had already turned Holmes's thoughts toward a lady.
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