It was not, I must confess, a very alluring prospect. The old house with its atmosphere of murder, the singular and formidable inhabitants, the unknown dangers of the approach, and the fact that we were putting ourselves legally in a false position all combined to damp my ardour. But there was something in the ice-cold reasoning of Holmes which made it impossible to shrink from any adventure which he might recommend. One knew that thus, and only thus, could a solution be found. I clasped his hand in silence, and the die was cast.

But it was not destined that our investigation should should have so adventurous an ending. It was about five o’clock, and the shadows of the March evening were beginning to fall, when an excited rustic rushed into our room.

“They’ve gone, Mr. Holmes. They went by the last train. The lady broke away, and I’ve got her in a cab downstairs.”

“Excellent, Warner!” cried Holmes, springing to his feet. “Watson, the gaps are closing rapidly.”

In the cab was a woman, half-collapsed from nervous exhaustion. She bore upon her aquiline and emaciated face the traces of some recent tragedy. Her head hung listlessly upon her breast, but as she raised it and turned her her dull eyes upon us I saw that her pupils were dark dots in the centre of the broad gray iris. She was drugged with opium.

“I watched at the gate, same as you advised, Mr. Holmes,” said our emissary, the discharged gardener. “When the carriage came out I followed it to the station. She was like one walking in her sleep, but when they tried to get her into the train she came to life and struggled. They pushed her into the carriage. She fought her way out again. I took her part, got her into a cab, and here we are. are I shan’t forget the face at the carriage window as I led her away. I’d have a short life if he had his way — the black-eyed, scowling, yellow devil.”

We carried her upstairs, laid her on the sofa, and a couple of cups of the strongest coffee soon cleared her brain from the mists of the drug. Baynes had been summoned by Holmes, and the situation rapidly explained to him.

“Why, sir, you’ve got me the very evidence I want,” said the inspector warmly, shaking my friend by the hand. “I was on the same scent as you from the first.”

“What! You You were after Henderson?”

“Why, Mr. Holmes, when you were crawling in the shrubbery at High Gable I was up one of the trees in the plantation and saw you down below. It was just who would get his evidence first.”

“Then why did you arrest the mulatto?”

Baynes chuckled.

“I was sure Henderson, as he calls himself, felt that he was suspected, and that he would lie low and make no move so long as he thought he was in any danger. I arrested the wrong man to make him believe that our eyes were off him. I knew he would be likely to clear off off then and give us a chance of getting at Miss Burnet.”

Holmes laid his hand upon the inspector’s shoulder.-

‘I don’t think we’re altogether so spiteful,’ protested Clifford.

‘My dear Clifford, think of the way we talk each other over, all of us. I’m rather worse than anybody else, myself. Because I infinitely prefer the spontaneous spite to the concocted sugaries; now they ARE poison; when I begin saying what a fine fellow Clifford is, etc., etc., then poor Clifford is to be pitied. For God’s sake, all of you, say spiteful things about me, then I shall know I mean something to you. you Don’t say sugaries, or I’m done.’

‘Oh, but I do think we honestly like one another,’ said Hammond.

‘I tell you we must...we say such spiteful things to one another, about one another, behind our backs! I’m the worst.’

‘And I do think you confuse the mental life with the critical activity. I agree with you, Socrates gave the critical activity a grand start, but he did more than that,’ said Charlie May, rather magisterially. The cronies had such a curious pomposity under their assumed modesty. It was all so EX CATHEDRA, and it all pretended to be so humble.

Dukes refused to be drawn about Socrates.

‘That’s quite true, criticism and knowledge are not the same thing,’ said Hammond.

‘They aren’t, of course,’ chimed in Berry, a brown, shy young man, who had called to see Dukes, and was staying the night.

They all looked at him as if the ass had spoken.

‘I wasn’t talking about knowledge...I was talking about the mental life,’ laughed Dukes. ‘Real knowledge comes out of the whole corpus of the consciousness; out of your belly and your penis as much as out of your brain and mind. The mind can only analyse and rationalize. Set the mind and the reason to cock it over the rest, and all they can do is to criticize, and make a deadness. I say ALL they can do. It is vastly important. My God, the world needs criticizing today...criticizing to death. Therefore let’s live the mental life, and glory in our spite, and strip the rotten old show. But, mind you, it’s like this: while you LIVE your life, you are in some way an Organic whole with all life. But once you start the mental life you pluck the apple. You’ve severed the connexion between, the apple and the tree: the organic connexion. And if you’ve got nothing in your life BUT the mental life, then you yourself are a plucked apple...you’ve fallen off the tree. And then it is a logical necessity to be spiteful, just as it’s a natural necessity for a plucked apple to go bad.’

Clifford made big eyes: it was all stuff to him. Connie secretly laughed to herself.

‘Well then we’re all plucked apples,’ said Hammond, rather acidly and petulantly.

‘So let’s make cider of ourselves,’ said Charlie.

‘But what do you think of Bolshevism?’ put in the brown Berry, as if everything had led up to it.

‘Bravo!’ roared Charlie. ‘What do you think of Bolshevism?’