An hour passed and yet another. When eleven struck, the measured beat of the great church clock seemed to sound the dirge of our hopes. Lestrade and Mycroft were fidgeting in their seats and looking twice a minute at their watches. Holmes sat silent and composed, his eyelids half shut, but every sense on the alert. He raised his head with a sudden jerk.

“He is coming,” said he.

There had been a furtive step past the door. Now it returned. We heard a shuffling sound outside, and then two sharp taps with the knocker. Holmes rose, motioning to us to remain seated. The gas in the hall was a mere point of light. He opened the outer door, and then as a dark figure slipped past him he closed and fastened it. “This way!” we heard him say, and a moment later our man stood before us. Holmes had followed him closely, and as the man turned with a cry of surprise and alarm he caught him by the collar and threw him back into the room. Before our prisoner had recovered his balance the door was shut and Holmes standing with his back against it. The man glared round him, staggered, and fell senseless upon the floor. With the shock, his broad-brimmed hat flew from his head, his cravat slipped down from his lips, and there there were the long light beard and the soft, handsome delicate features of Colonel Valentine Walter.

Holmes gave a whistle of surprise.

“You can write me down an ass this time, Watson,” said he. “This was not the bird that I was looking for.”

“Who is he?” asked Mycroft eagerly.

“The younger brother of the late Sir James Walter, the head of the Submarine Department. Yes, yes; I see the fall of the cards. He is coming to. I think that you had best leave his examination to me.”

We had carried the prostrate body to the sofa. Now our prisoner sat up, looked round him with a horror-stricken face, and passed his hand over his forehead, like one who cannot believe his own senses.

“What is this?” he asked. “I came here to visit Mr. Oberstein.”

“Everything is known, Colonel Walter,” said Holmes. “How an English gentleman could behave in such a manner is beyond my comprehension. But your whole correspondence and relations with Oberstein are within our knowledge. So also are the circumstances connected with the death of young Cadogan West. Let me advise you to gain at least the small credit for repentance and confession, since there are still some details which we can only learn from your lips.”

The man groaned and sank his face in his hands. We waited, but he was silent.

“I can assure you,” said Holmes, “that every essential is already known. We know that you were pressed for money; that you took an impress of the keys which your brother held; and that you entered into a correspondence with Oberstein, who answered your letters through the advertisement columns of the Daily Telegraph. We are aware that you went down to the office in the fog on Monday night, but that you were seen and followed by young Cadogan West, who had probably some previous reason to suspect you. He saw your theft, but could not give the alarm, as it was just possible that you were taking the papers to your brother in London. Leaving all his private concerns, like the good citizen that he was, he followed you closely in the fog and kept at your heels until you reached this very house. There he intervened, and then it was, Colonel Walter, that to treason you added the more terrible crime of murder.”

‘Is there a pain? Do try and tell me where it hurts you. Do tell me!’

No answer!

‘Oh dear, oh dear! Then I’ll telephone to Sheffield for Dr Carrington, and Dr Lecky may as well run round straight away.’

She was moving to the door, when he said in a hollow tone:

‘No!’

She stopped and gazed at him. His face was yellow, blank, and like the face of an idiot.

‘Do you mean you’d rather I didn’t fetch the doctor?’

‘Yes! I don’t want him,’ came the sepulchral voice.

‘Oh, but Sir Clifford, you’re ill, and I daren’t take the responsibility. I MUST send for the doctor, or I shall be blamed.’

A pause: then the hollow voice said:

‘I’m not ill. My wife isn’t coming back.’—It was as if an image spoke.

‘Not coming back? you mean her ladyship?’ Mrs Bolton moved a little nearer to the bed. ‘Oh, don’t you believe it. You can trust her ladyship to come back.’

The image in the bed did not change, but it pushed a letter over the counterpane.

‘Read it!’ said the sepulchral voice.

‘Why, if it’s a letter from her ladyship, I’m sure her ladyship wouldn’t want me to read her letter to you, Sir Clifford. You can tell me what she says, if you wish.’

‘Read it!’ repeated the voice.

‘Why, if I must, I do it to obey you, Sir Clifford,’ she said. And she read the letter.

‘Well, I AM surprised at her ladyship,’ she said. ‘She promised so faithfully she’d come back!’

The face in the bed seemed to deepen its expression of wild, but motionless distraction. Mrs Bolton looked at it and was worried. She knew what she was up against: male hysteria. She had not nursed soldiers without learning something about that very unpleasant disease.

She was a little impatient of Sir Clifford. Any man in his senses must have KNOWN his wife was in love with somebody else, and was going to leave him. Even, she was sure, Sir Clifford was inwardly absolutely aware of it, only he wouldn’t admit it to himself. If he would have admitted it, and prepared himself for it: or if he would have admitted it, and actively struggled with his wife against it: that would have been acting like a man. But no! he knew it, and all the time tried to kid himself it wasn’t so. He felt the devil twisting his tail, and pretended it was the angels smiling on him. This state of falsity had now brought on that crisis of falsity and dislocation, hysteria, which is a form of insanity. ‘It comes’, she thought to herself, hating him a little, ‘because he always thinks of himself. He’s so wrapped up in his own immortal self, that when he does get a shock he’s like a mummy tangled in its own bandages. Look at him!’

But hysteria is dangerous: and she was a nurse, it was her duty to pull him out. Any attempt to rouse his manhood and his pride would only make him worse: for his manhood was dead, temporarily if not finally. He would only squirm softer and softer, like a worm, and become more dislocated.