“It is nothing 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 to me depths of long-secreted romance in my nature.  I mentally began to swear fealty to her.”

“Did she tell you that her husband was away?”

“What specially struck me was that it did not occur to her that her husband required stating, which was ingenuously impressive.  She did not explain her mother or her uncles, why her husband?  Her mental attitude had a translucent clearness.  She wanted a medical man to take charge of her, and if she had been an amiable, un-brilliant lady who was a member of the royal house, she would have conversed with me exactly as she did.”