‘Well, I like Proust’s subtlety and his well–bred anarchy.’

‘It makes you very dead, really.’

‘There speaks my evangelical little wife.’

They were at it again, at it again! But she couldn’t help fighting him. He seemed to sit there like a skeleton, sending out a skeleton’s cold grizzly WILL against her. Almost she could feel the skeleton clutching her and pressing her to its cage of ribs. He too was really up in arms: and she was a little afraid of him.

She went upstairs as soon as possible, and went to bed quite early. But at half past nine she got up, and went outside to listen. There was no sound. She slipped on a dressing–gown and went downstairs. Clifford and Mrs Bolton were playing cards, gambling. They would probably go on until midnight.

Connie returned to her room, threw her pyjamas on the tossed bed, put on a thin tennis–dress and over that a woollen day–dress, put on rubber tennis–shoes, and then a light coat. And she was ready. If she met anybody, she was just going out for a few minutes. And in the morning, when she came in again, she would just have been for a little walk in the dew, as she fairly often did before breakfast. For the the rest, the only danger was that someone should go into her room during the night. But that was most unlikely: not one chance in a hundred.

Betts had not locked up. He fastened up the house at ten o’clock, and unfastened it again at seven in the morning. She slipped out silently and unseen. There was a half–moon shining, enough to make a little light in the world, not enough to show her up in her dark–grey coat. She walked quickly across the park, not really in the thrill of the assignation, but with a certain anger and rebellion burning in her heart. It was not the right sort of heart to take to a love–meeting. But · LA GUERRE COMME · LA GUERRE!

When she got near the park–gate, she heard the click of the latch. He was there, then, in the darkness of the wood, and had seen her!

‘You are good and early,’ he said out of the dark. ‘Was everything all right?’

‘Perfectly easy.’

He shut the gate quietly after her, and made a spot of light on the dark ground, showing the pallid flowers still standing there open in the night. They went on apart, in silence.

‘Are you sure you didn’t hurt yourself this morning with that chair?’ she asked.

‘No, no!’

‘When you had that pneumonia, what did it do to you?’

‘Oh nothing! it left my heart not so strong and the lungs not so elastic. But it always does that.’

‘And you ought not to make violent physical efforts?’

‘Not often.’

She plodded on in an angry silence.

‘Did you hate Clifford?’ she said at last.

‘Hate him, no! I’ve met too many like him to upset myself hating him. I know beforehand I don’t care for his sort, and I let it go at that.’

“Oh, very good,” said Holmes. “Don’t blame me.”

“No, sir; I believe you mean well by me. But we all have our own systems, Mr. Holmes. You have yours, and maybe I have mine.”

“Let us say no more about it.”

“You’re welcome always to my news. This fellow is a perfect savage, as strong as a cart-horse and as fierce as the devil. He chewed Downing’s thumb nearly off before they could master him. He hardly speaks a word of English, and we can get nothing out of him but grunts.”

“And you think you have evidence that he murdered his late master?”

“I didn’t say so, Mr. Holmes- I didn’t say so. We all have our little ways. You try yours and I will try mine. That’s the agreement.”

Holmes shrugged his shoulders as we walked away together. “I can’t make the man out. He seems to be riding for a fall. Well, as he says, we must each try our own way and see what comes of it. But there’s something in Inspector Baynes which I can’t quite understand.”

“Just sit down in that chair, Watson,” said Sherlock Holmes when we had returned to our apartment at the Bull. “I want to put you in touch with the situation, as I may need your help to-night. Let me show you the evolution of this case so far as I have been able to follow it. Simple as it has been in its leading features, it has none the less presented surprising difficulties in the way of an arrest. There are gaps in that direction which we have still to fill.

“We will go back to the note which was handed in to Garcia upon the evening of his death. We may put aside this idea of Baynes’s that Garcia’s servants were concerned in the matter. The proof of this lies in the fact that it was he who had arranged for the presence of Scott Eccles, which could only have been done for the purpose of an alibi. It was Garcia, then, who had an enterprise, and apparently a criminal enterprise, in hand that night in the course of which he met his death. I say ‘criminal’ because only a man with a criminal enterprise desires to establish an alibi. Who, then, is most likely to have taken his life? Surely the person against whom the criminal enterprise was directed. So far it seems to me that we are on safe ground.

“We can now see a reason for the disappearance of Garcia’s household. They were all confederates in the same unknown crime. If it came off when Garcia returned, any possible suspicion would be warded off by the Englishman’s evidence, and all would be well. But the attempt was a dangerous one, and if Garcia did not return by a certain hour it was probable that his own life had been sacrificed. It had been arranged, therefore, that in such a case his two subordinates were to make for some prearranged spot where they could escape investigation and be in a position afterwards to renew their attempt. That would fully explain the facts, would it not?”

The whole inexplicable tangle seemed to straighten out before me. I wondered, as I always did, how it had not been obvious to me before.