“Upon my word, Watson!” said Holmes at last with an unsteady voice, “I owe you both my thanks and an apology. It was an unjustifiable experiment even for one’s self, and doubly so for a friend. I am really very sorry.”

“You know,” I answered with some emotion, for I had never seen so much of Holmes’s heart before, “that it is my greatest joy and privilege to help you.”

He relapsed at once into the half-humorous, half-cynical vein which was his habitual attitude to those about him. “It would be superfluous to drive us mad, my dear Watson,” said he. “A candid observer would certainly declare that we were so already before we embarked upon so wild an experiment. I confess that I never imagined that the effect could be so sudden and so severe.” He dashed into the cottage, and, reappearing with the burning lamp held at full arm’s length, he threw it among a bank of brambles. “We must give the room a little time to clear. I take it, Watson, that you have no longer a shadow of a doubt as to how these tragedies were produced?”

“None whatever.”

“But the cause remains as obscure as before. Come into the arbour arbour here and let us discuss it together. That villainous stuff seems still to linger round my throat. I think we must admit that all the evidence points to this man, Mortimer Tregennis, having been the criminal in the first tragedy, though he was the victim in the second one. We must remember, in the first place, that there is some story of a family quarrel, followed by a reconciliation. How bitter that quarrel may have been, or how hollow the reconciliation we cannot tell. When I think of Mortimer Tregennis, with the foxy face and the small shrewd, beady eyes behind the spectacles, he is not a man whom I should judge to be of a particularly forgiving disposition. Well, in the next place, you will remember that this idea of someone moving in the garden, which took our attention for a moment from the real cause of the tragedy, emanated from him. He had a motive in misleading us. Finally, if he did not throw this substance into the fire at the moment of leaving the room, who did do so? The affair happened immediately after his departure. Had anyone else come in, the family would certainly have risen from the table. Besides, in peaceful Cornwall, visitors do not arrive after ten o’clock at night. We may take it, then, that all the evidence points to Mortimer Tregennis as the culprit.”

“Then his own death was suicide!”

“Well, Watson, it is on the face of it a not impossible supposition. The man who had the guilt upon his soul of having brought such a fate upon his own family might well be driven by remorse to inflict it upon himself. There are, however, some cogent reasons against it. Fortunately, there is one man in England who knows all about it, and I have made arrangements by which we shall hear the facts this afternoon from his own lips. Ah! he is a little before his time. Perhaps you would kindly step this way, Dr. Leon Sterndale. We have been conducting a chemical experiment indoors which has left our little room hardly fit for the reception of so distinguished a visitor.”

‘I think,’ said Hilda, ‘it will be best if she names quite another man as co–respondent and you stay out of it altogether.’

‘But I thought I’d put my foot right in.’

‘I mean in the divorce proceedings.’

He gazed at her in wonder. Connie had not dared mention the Duncan scheme to him.

‘I don’t follow,’ he said.

‘We have a friend who would probably agree to be named as co–respondent, so that your name need not appear,’ said Hilda.

‘You mean a man?’

‘Of course!’

‘But she’s got no other?’

He looked in wonder at Connie.

‘No, no!’ she said hastily. ‘Only that old friendship, quite simple, no love.’

‘Then why should the fellow take the blame? If he’s had nothing out of you?’

‘Some men are chivalrous and don’t only count what they get out of a woman,’ said Hilda.

‘One for me, eh? But who’s the johnny?’

‘A friend whom we’ve known since we were children in Scotland, an artist.’

‘Duncan Forbes!’ he said at once, for Connie had talked to him. ‘And how would you shift the blame on to him?’

‘They could stay together in some hotel, or she could even stay in his apartment.’

‘Seems to me like a lot of fuss for nothing,’ he said.

‘What else do you suggest?’ said Hilda. ‘If your name appears, you will get no divorce from your wife, who is apparently quite an impossible person to be mixed up with.’

‘All that!’ he said grimly.

There was a long silence.

‘We could go right away,’ he said.

‘There is no right away for Connie,’ said Hilda. ‘Clifford is too well known.’

Again the silence of pure frustration.

‘The world is what it is. If you want to live together without being persecuted, you will have to marry. To marry, you both have to be divorced. So how are you both going about it?’

He was silent for a long time.

‘How are you going about it for us?’ he said.

‘We will see if Duncan will consent to figure as co–respondent: then we must get Clifford to divorce Connie: and you must go on with your divorce, and you must both keep apart till you are free.’

‘Sounds like a lunatic asylum.’

‘Possibly! And the world would look on you as lunatics: or worse.

‘What is worse?’

‘Criminals, I suppose.’

‘Hope I can plunge in the dagger a few more times yet,’ he said, grinning. Then he was silent, and angry.

‘Well!’ he said at last. ‘I agree to anything. The world is a raving idiot, and no man can kill it: though I’ll do my best. But you re right. We must rescue ourselves as best we can.’

He looked in humiliation, anger, weariness and misery at Connie.

‘Ma lass!’ he said. ‘The world’s goin’ to put salt on thy tail.’