but suggestive, and that it suggests mystery to me makes
me feel as if I myself, instead of a serious practitioner, am a
professional detective."

"Is it a case in which you might need help?"

"It is a case in which I am impelled to give help, if it proves that it
is necessary. She is such an exceedingly nice woman."

"Good, bad, or indifferent?"

"Of a goodness, I should say--of a goodness which might prevent the
brain acting in the manner in which a brutal world requires at present
that the human brain should act in self-defence. Of a goodness which may
possibly have betrayed her into the most pathetic trouble."

"Of the kind--?" was Mrs. Warren's suggestion.

"Of that kind," with a troubled look; "but she is a married woman."

"She _says_ she is a married woman."

"No. She does not say so, but she looks it. That's the chief feature of
the case. Any woman bearing more obviously the stamp of respectable
British matrimony than this one does, it has not fallen to me to look
upon."

Mrs. Warren's expression was _intriguee_ in the extreme. There was a
freshness in this, at least.

"But if she bears the stamp as well as the name--! Do tell me all it is
possible to tell. Come and sit down, Harold."

He sat down and entered into details.

"I was called to a lady who, though not ill, seemed fatigued from a
hurried journey and, as it seemed to me, the effects of anxiety and
repressed excitement. I found her in a third-class lodging-house in a
third-class street. It was a house which had the air of a place hastily
made inhabitable for some special reason. There were evidences that
money had been spent, but that there had been no time to arrange things.
I have seen something of the kind before, and when I was handed into my
patient's sitting-room, thought I knew the type I should find. It is
always more or less the same,--a girl or a very young woman, pretty and
refined and frightened, or pretty and vulgar and 'carrying it off' with
transparent pretences and airs and graces. Anything more remote from
what I expected you absolutely cannot conceive."

"Not young and pretty?"

"About thirty-five or six. A fresh, finely built woman with eyes as
candid as a six-year-old girl's. Quite unexplanatory and with the best
possible manner, only sweetly anxious about her health. Her confidence
in my advice and the earnestness of her desire to obey my least
instructions were moving. Ten minutes' conversation with her revealed