seen
what I have tried to describe to you, and I was morally certain that I
had seen Mrs. Black. And then there was the gossip of the place, the
suspicion of foul play, which I knew to be false, and my own conviction
that there was some deadly mischief or other going on in that bright red
house at the corner of Devon Road: how to construct a theory of a
reasonable kind out of these two elements. In short, I found myself in a
world of mystery; I puzzled my head over it and filled up my leisure
moments by gathering together odd threads of speculation, but I never
moved a step towards any real solution, and as the summer days went on
the matter seemed to grow misty and indistinct, shadowing some vague
terror, like a nightmare of last month. I suppose it would before long
have faded into the background of my brain--I should not have forgotten
it, for such a thing could never be forgotten--but one morning as I was
looking over the paper my eye was caught by a heading over some two
dozen lines of small type. The words I had seen were simply, "The
Harlesden Case," and I knew what I was going to read. Mrs. Black was
dead. Black had called in another medical man to certify as to cause of
death, and something or other had aroused the strange doctor's
suspicions and there had been an inquest and _post-mortem_. And the
result? That, I will confess, did astonish me considerably; it was the
triumph of the unexpected. The two doctors who made the autopsy were
obliged to confess that they could not discover the faintest trace of
any kind of foul play; their most exquisite tests and reagents failed to
detect the presence of poison in the most infinitesimal quantity. Death,
they found, had been caused by a somewhat obscure and scientifically
interesting form of brain disease. The tissue of the brain and the
molecules of the grey matter had undergone a most extraordinary series
of changes; and the younger of the two doctors, who has some reputation,
I believe, as a specialist in brain trouble, made some remarks in giving
his evidence which struck me deeply at the time, though I did not then
grasp their full significance. He said: "At the commencement of the
examination I was astonished to find appearances of a character entirely
new to me, notwithstanding my somewhat large experience. I need not
specify these appearances at present, it will be sufficient for me to
state that as I proceeded in my task I could scarcely believe that the
brain