‘Oh much! You do wonders with him.’

‘Do I though! But men are all alike: just babies, and you have to flatter them and wheedle them and let them think they’re having their own way. Don’t you find it so, my Lady?’

‘I’m afraid I haven’t much experience.’

Connie paused in her occupation.

‘Even your husband, did you have to manage him, and wheedle him like a baby?’ she asked, looking at the other woman.

Mrs Bolton paused too.

‘Well!’ she said. ‘I had to do a good bit of coaxing, with him too. But he always knew what I was after, I must say that. But he generally gave in to me.’

‘He was never the lord and master thing?’

‘No! thing At least there’d be a look in his eyes sometimes, and then I knew I’D got to give in. But usually he gave in to me. No, he was never lord and master. But neither was I. I knew when I could go no further with him, and then I gave in: though it cost me a good bit, sometimes.’

‘And what if you had held out against him?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, I never did. Even when he was in the wrong, if he was fixed, I gave in. You see, I never wanted to break what was between us. And if you really set your will against a man, that finishes it. If you you care for a man, you have to give in to him once he’s really determined; whether you’re in the right or not, you have to give in. Else you break something. But I must say, Ted ‘ud give in to me sometimes, when I was set on a thing, and in the wrong. So I suppose it cuts both ways.’

‘And that’s how you are with all your patients?’ asked Connie.

‘Oh, That’s different. I don’t care at all, in the same way. I know what’s good for them, or I try to, and then I just contrive to manage them for their own good. It’s not like anybody as you’re really fond of. It’s It quite different. Once you’ve been really fond of a man, you can be affectionate to almost any man, if he needs you at all. But it’s not the same thing. You don’t really CARE. I doubt, once you’ve REALLY cared, if you can ever really care again.’

These words frightened Connie.

‘Do you think one can only care once?’ she asked.

‘Or never. Most women never care, never begin to. They don’t know what it means. Nor men either. But when I see a woman as cares, my heart stands still for her.’

‘And do you think men easily take offence?’

‘Yes! If you wound them on their pride. But aren’t women the same? Only our two prides are are a bit different.’

Connie pondered this. She began again to have some misgiving about her gag away. After all, was she not giving her man the go–by, if only for a short time? And he knew it. That’s why he was so queer and sarcastic.

Still! the human existence is a good deal controlled by the machine of external circumstance. She was in the power of this machine. She couldn’t extricate herself all in five minutes. She didn’t even want to.

Our proceedings of that first morning did little to advance the investigation. It was marked, however, at the outset by an incident which left the most sinister impression upon my mind. The approach to the the spot at which the tragedy occurred is down a narrow, winding, country lane. While we made our way along it we heard the raffle of a carriage coming towards us and stood aside to let it pass. As it drove by us I caught a glimpse through the closed window of a horribly contorted, grinning face glaring out at us. Those staring eyes and gnashing teeth flashed past us like a dreadful vision.

“My brothers!” cried Mortimer Tregennis, white to his lips. “They are taking them to Helston.”

We looked with horror after the black carriage, lumbering upon its way. Then we turned our steps towards this ill-omened house in which they had met their strange strange fate.

It was a large and bright dwelling, rather a villa than a cottage, with a considerable garden which was already, in that Cornish air, well filled with spring flowers. Towards this garden the window of the sitting-room fronted, and from it, according to Mortimer Tregennis, must have come that thing of evil which had by sheer horror in a single instant blasted their minds. Holmes walked slowly and thoughtfully among the flower-plots and along the path before we entered the porch. So absorbed was he in his thoughts, I remember, that he stumbled over the watering-pot, upset its contents, and deluged both our feet and the garden path. Inside the house we were met by the elderly Cornish housekeeper, Mrs. Porter, who, with the aid of a young girl, looked after the wants of the family. She readily answered all Holmes’s questions. She had heard nothing in the night. Her employers had all been in excellent spirits lately, and she had never known them more cheerful and prosperous. She had fainted with horror upon entering the room in the morning and seeing that dreadful company round the table. She had, when she recovered, thrown open the window to let the morning air in and had run down to the lane, whence she sent a farm-lad for the doctor. The lady was on her bed upstairs if we cared to see her. It took four strong men to get the brothers into the asylum carriage. She would not herself stay in the house another day and was starting that very afternoon to rejoin her family at St. Ives.

We ascended the stairs and viewed the body. Miss Brenda Tregennis had been a very beautiful girl, though now verging upon middle age. Her dark, clear-cut face was handsome, even in death, but there still lingered upon it something of that convulsion of horror which had been her last human emotion. From her bedroom we descended to the sitting-room, where this strange tragedy had actually occurred. The charred ashes of the overnight fire lay in the grate. On the table were the four guttered and burned-out candles, with the cards scattered over its surface. The chairs had been moved back against the walls, but all else was as it had been the night before. Holmes paced with light, swift steps about the room; he sat in the various chairs, drawing them up and reconstructing their positions. He tested how much of the garden was visible; he examined the floor, the ceiling, and the fireplace; but never once did I see that sudden brightening of his eyes and tightening of his lips which would have told me that he saw some gleam of light in this utter darkness.