there is something very attractive about that livid face at the
window, and I would not have missed the case for worlds."

"You have a theory?"

"Yes, a provisional one. But I shall be surprised if it does not turn
out to be correct. This woman's first husband is in that cottage."

"Why do you think so?"

"How else can we explain her frenzied anxiety that her second one should
not enter it? The facts, as I read them, are something like this: This
woman was married in America. Her husband developed some hateful
qualities, or, shall we say, that he contracted some loathsome disease,
and became a leper or an imbecile. She fled from him at last, returned
to England, changed her name, and started her life, as she thought,
afresh. She had been married three years, and believed that her position
was quite secure--having shown her husband the death certificate of some
man, whose name she had assumed--when suddenly her whereabouts was
discovered by her first husband, or, we may suppose, by some
unscrupulous woman, who had attached herself to the invalid. They write
to the wife and threaten to come and expose her. She asks for a hundred
pounds and endeavours to buy them off. They come in spite of it, and
when the husband mentions casually to the wife that there are new-comers
in the cottage, she knows in some way that they are her pursuers. She
waits until her husband is asleep, and then she rushes down to endeavour
to persuade them to leave her in peace. Having no success, she goes
again next morning, and her husband meets her, as he has told us, as she
came out. She promises him then not to go there again, but two days
afterwards, the hope of getting rid of those dreadful neighbours is too
strong for her, and she makes another attempt, taking down with her the
photograph which had probably been demanded from her. In the midst of
this interview the maid rushes in to say that the master has come home,
on which the wife, knowing that he would come straight down to the
cottage, hurries the inmates out at the back door, into that grove of
fir trees probably which was mentioned as standing near. In this way he
finds the place deserted. I shall be very much surprised, however, if it
is still so when he reconnoitres it this evening. What do you think of
my theory?"

"It is all surmise."

"But at least it covers all the facts. When new facts come to our
knowledge, which cannot be covered by it, it will be time enough to
reconside