very evident."

"Absurdly commonplace, is it not?"

"But the boots and the bath?"

"Equally childish. You are in the habit of doing up your boots in a
certain way. I see them on this occasion fastened with an elaborate
double bow, which is not your usual method of tying them. You have,
therefore, had them off. Who has tied them? A bootmaker--or the boy
at the bath. It is unlikely that it is the bootmaker, since your boots
are nearly new. Well, what remains? The bath. Absurd, is it not?
But, for all that, the Turkish bath has served a purpose."

"What is that?"

"You say that you have had it because you need a change. Let me
suggest that you take one. How would Lausanne do, my dear
Watson--first-class tickets and all expenses paid on a princely scale?"

"Splendid! But why?"

Holmes leaned back in his armchair and took his notebook from his
pocket.

"One of the most dangerous classes in the world," said he, "is the
drifting and friendless woman. She is the most harmless and often the
most useful of mortals, but she is the inevitable inciter of crime in
others. She is helpless. She is migratory. She has sufficient means
to take her from country to country and from hotel to hotel. She is
lost, as often as not, in a maze of obscure pensions and
boardinghouses. She is a stray chicken in a world of foxes. When she
is gobbled up she is hardly missed. I much fear that some evil has come
to the Lady Frances Carfax."

I was relieved at this sudden descent from the general to the
particular. Holmes consulted his notes.

"Lady Frances," he continued, "is the sole survivor of the direct
family of the late Earl of Rufton. The estates went, as you may
remember, in the male line. She was left with limited means, but with
some very remarkable old Spanish jewellery of silver and curiously cut
diamonds to which she was fondly attached--too attached, for she
refused to leave them with her banker and always carried them about
with her. A rather pathetic figure, the Lady Frances, a beautiful
woman, still in fresh middle age, and yet, by a strange change, the
last derelict of what only twenty years ago was a goodly fleet."

"What has happened to her, then?"

"Ah, what has happened to the Lady Frances? Is she alive or dead?
There is our problem. She is a lady of precise habits, and for four
years it has been her invariable custom to write every second week to
Miss Dobney, her old governess, who has long r