“Well, Watson, it’s as well we have not to turn out to-night,” said Holmes, laying aside his lens and rolling up the palimpsest.  “I’ve done enough for one sitting.  It is trying work for the eyes.  So far as I can make out, it is nothing more exciting than an Abbey’s accounts dating from the second half of the fifteenth century.  Halloa! halloa! halloa!  What’s this?”

Amid the droning of the wind there had come the stamping of a horse’s hoofs, and the long grind of a wheel as it rasped against the curb.  The cab which I had seen had pulled up at our door.

“What can he want?” I ejaculated, as a man stepped out of it.

“Want?  He wants us.  And we, my poor Watson, want overcoats and cravats and goloshes, and every aid that man ever invented to fight the weather.  Wait a bit, though!  There’s the cab off again!  There’s hope yet.  He’d have kept it if he had wanted us to come.  Run down, my dear fellow, and open the door, for all virtuous folk have been long in bed.”

When the light of the hall lamp fell upon our midnight visitor, I had no difficulty in recognizing him.  It was young Stanley Hopkins, a promising detective, in whose career Holmes had several times shown a very practical interest.

“Is he in?” he asked, eagerly.

“Come up, my dear sir,” said Holmes’s voice from above.  “I hope you have no designs upon us such a night as this.”

The detective mounted the stairs, and our lamp gleamed upon his shining waterproof.  I helped him out of it, while Holmes knocked a blaze out of the logs in the grate.

“Now, my dear Hopkins, draw up and warm your toes,” said he.  “Here’s a cigar, and the doctor has a prescription containing hot water and a lemon, which is good medicine on a night like this.  It must be something important which has brought you out in such a gale.”

“It is indeed, Mr. Holmes.  I’ve had a bustling afternoon, I promise you.  Did you see anything of the Yoxley case in the latest editions?”

“I’ve seen nothing later than the fifteenth century to-day.”

“Well, it was only a paragraph, and all wrong at that, so you have not missed anything.  I haven’t let the grass grow under my feet.  It’s down in Kent, seven miles from Chatham and three from the railway line.  I was wired for at 3:15, reached Yoxley Old Place at 5, conducted my investigation, was back at Charing Cross by the last train, and straight to you by cab.”

“Which means, I suppose, that you are not quite clear about your case?”

“It means that I can make neither head nor tail of it.  So far as I can see, it is just as tangled a business as ever I handled, and yet at first it seemed so simple that one couldn’t go wrong.  There’s no motive, Mr. Holmes.  That’s what bothers me—­I can’t put my hand on a motive.  Here’s a man dead—­there’s no denying that—­but, so far as I can see, no reason on earth why anyone should wish him harm.”