“The man was a Spaniard. I suggest that ‘D’ stands for Dolores, a common female name in Spain.”

“Good, Watson, very good — but quite inadmissible. A Spaniard would write to a Spaniard in Spanish. The writer of this note is certainly English. Well, we can only possess our souls in patience until this excellent inspector comes back for us. Meanwhile we can thank our lucky fate which has rescued us for a few short hours from the insufferable fatigues of idleness.”

An answer had arrived to Holmes’s telegram before our Surrey officer had returned. Holmes read it and was about to place it in his notebook when he caught a glimpse of my expectant face. He tossed it across with a laugh.

“We are moving in exalted circles,” said he.

The telegram was a list of names and addresses:

Lord Harringby, The Dingle; Sir George Ffolliott, Oxshott

Towers; Mr. Hynes Hynes, J.P., Purdey Place; Mr. James

Baker Williams, Forton Old Hall; Mr. Henderson, High

Gable; Rev. Joshua Stone, Nether Walsling.

“This is a very obvious way of limiting our field of operations,” said Holmes. “No doubt Baynes, with his methodical mind, has already adopted some similar plan.”

“I don’t quite understand.”

“Well, my dear fellow, we we have already arrived at the conclusion that the message received by Garcia at dinner was an appointment or an assignation. Now, if the obvious reading of it is correct, and in order to keep this tryst one has to ascend a main stair and seek the seventh door in a corridor, it is perfectly clear that the house is a very large one. It is equally certain that this house cannot be more than a mile or two from Oxshott since Garcia was walking in that direction and hoped, according to my reading of the facts, to be back in Wisteria Lodge in time to avail himself of an alibi, which would only be valid up to one o’clock. As the number of large houses close to Oxshott must be limited, I adopted the obvious method of sending to the agents mentioned by Scott Eccles and obtaining a list of them. Here they are in this telegram, and the other end of our tangled skein must lie among them.”

It was nearly six o’clock before we found ourselves in the pretty Surrey village of Esher, with Inspector Baynes as our companion.

Holmes and I had taken things for the night, and found comfortable quarters at the Bull. Finally we set out in the company of the detective on our visit to Wisteria Lodge. It was a cold, dark March evening, with a sharp wind and a fine rain beating upon our faces, a fit setting for the wild common over which our road passed and the tragic goal to which it led us.

2. The Tiger of San Pedro

A cold and melancholy walk of a couple of miles brought us to a high wooden gate, which opened into a gloomy avenue of chestnuts. The curved and shadowed drive led us to a low, dark house, pitch-black against a slate-coloured sky. From the front window upon the left of the door there peeped a glimmer of a feeble light.

‘It seems to me they’re a bad boss,’ she said.

‘Then you suggest what they should do.’

‘They don’t take their boss–ship seriously enough,’ she said.

‘They take it far more seriously than you take your ladyship,’ he said.

‘That’s thrust upon me. I don’t really want it,’ she blurted out. He stopped the chair and looked at her.

‘Who’s shirking their responsibility now!’ he said. ‘Who is trying to get away NOW from the responsibility of their own boss–ship, as you call it?’

‘But I don’t want any boss–ship,’ she protested.

‘Ah! But that is funk. You’ve got it: fated to it. And you should live up to it. Who has given the colliers all they have that’s worth having: all their political liberty, and their education, such as it is, their sanitation, their health–conditions, their books, their music, everything. Who has given it them? Have colliers given it to colliers? No! All the Wragbys and Shipleys in England have given their part, and must go on giving. There’s your responsibility.’

Connie listened, and flushed very red.

‘I’d like to give something,’ she said. ‘But I’m not allowed. Everything is to be sold and paid for now; and all the things you mention now, Wragby and Shipley SELLS them to the people, at a good prof it. Everything is sold. You don’t give one heart–beat of real sympathy. And besides, who has taken away from the people their natural life and manhood, and given them this industrial horror? Who has done that?’

‘And what must I do?’ he asked, green. ‘Ask them to come and pillage me?’

‘Why is Tevershall so ugly, so hideous? Why are their lives so hopeless?’

‘They built their own Tevershall, that’s part of their display of freedom. They built themselves their pretty Tevershall, and they live their own pretty lives. I can’t live their lives for them. Every beetle must live its own life.’

‘But you make them work for you. They live the life of your coal–mine.’

‘Not at all. Every beetle finds its own food. Not one man is forced to work for me.

‘Their lives are industrialized and hopeless, and so are ours,’ she cried.

‘I don’t think they are. That’s just a romantic figure of speech, a relic of the swooning and die–away romanticism. You don’t look at all a hopeless figure standing there, Connie my dear.’

Which was true. For her dark–blue eyes were flashing, her colour was hot in her cheeks, she looked full of a rebellious passion far from the dejection of hopelessness. She noticed, ill the tussocky places of the grass, cottony young cowslips standing up still bleared in their down. And she wondered with rage, why it was she felt Clifford was so WRONG, yet she couldn’t say it to him, she could not say exactly WHERE he was wrong.