He was advancing again with strange, tense movements, and clenched fist, and the face of a murderer. But swift as lightning she had flashed out of the door, and they heard her running upstairs.

He stood for a moment looking at the door. Then, like a defeated animal, he turned and went back to his seat by the fire.

Gudrun was very white. Out of the intense silence, the mother’s voice was heard saying, cold and angry:

‘Well, you shouldn’t take so much notice of her.’

Again the silence fell, each followed a separate set of emotions and thoughts.

Suddenly the door opened again: Ursula, dressed in hat hat and furs, with a small valise in her hand:

‘Good–bye!’ she said, in her maddening, bright, almost mocking tone. ‘I’m going.’

And in the next instant the door was closed, they heard the outer door, then her quick steps down the garden path, then the gate banged, and her light footfall was gone. There was a silence like death in the house.

Ursula went straight to the station, hastening heedlessly on winged feet. There was no train, she must walk on to the junction. As she went through the darkness, she began to cry, and she wept bitterly, with a dumb, heart–broken, child’s anguish, all all the way on the road, and in the train. Time passed unheeded and unknown, she did not know where she was, nor what was taking place. Only she wept from fathomless depths of hopeless, hopeless grief, the terrible grief of a child, that knows no extenuation.

Yet her voice had the same defensive brightness as she spoke to Birkin’s landlady at the door.

‘Good evening! Is Mr Birkin in? Can I see him?’

‘Yes, he’s in. He’s in his study.’

Ursula slipped past the woman. His door opened. He had heard her voice.

‘Hello!’ he exclaimed in surprise, seeing her standing there with the valise in her her hand, and marks of tears on her face. She was one who wept without showing many traces, like a child.

‘Do I look a sight?’ she said, shrinking.

‘No—why? Come in,’ he took the bag from her hand and they went into the study.

There—immediately, her lips began to tremble like those of a child that remembers again, and the tears came rushing up.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, taking her in his arms. She sobbed violently on his shoulder, whilst he held her still, waiting.

‘What’s the matter?’ he said again, when she was quieter. But she only pressed her face further into his shoulder, in pain, pain like a child that cannot tell.

‘What is it, then?’ he asked. Suddenly she broke away, wiped her eyes, regained her composure, and went and sat in a chair.

‘Father hit me,’ she announced, sitting bunched up, rather like a ruffled bird, her eyes very bright.

‘What for?’ he said.

She looked away, and would not answer. There was a pitiful redness about her sensitive nostrils, and her quivering lips.

“You would lose your money,” Holmes remarked calmly. “As for the article, I wrote it myself.”

“You!”

“Yes; I have a turn both for observation and for deduction. The theories which I have expressed there, and which appear to to you to be so chimerical, are really extremely practical — so practical that I depend upon them for my bread and cheese.”

“And how?” I asked involuntarily.

“Well, I have a trade of my own. I suppose I am the only one in the world. I’m a consulting detective, if you can understand what that is. Here in London we have lots of government detectives and lots of private ones. When these fellows are at fault, they come to me, and I manage to put them on the right scent. They lay all the evidence before me, and I am generally able, by the the help of my knowledge of the history of crime, to set them straight. There is a strong family resemblance about misdeeds, and if you have all the details of a thousand at your finger ends, it is odd if you can’t unravel the thousand and first. Lestrade is a well-known detective. He got himself into a fog recently over a forgery case, and that was what brought him here.”

“And these other people?”

“They are mostly sent on by private inquiry agencies. They are all people who are in trouble about something and want a little enlightening. I listen to their story, they listen to my comments, and then I pocket my fee.”

“But do you mean to say,” I said, “that without leaving your room you can unravel some knot which other men can make nothing of, although they have seen every detail for themselves?”

“Quite so. I have a kind of intuition that way. Now and again a case turns up which is a little more complex. Then I have to bustle about and see things with my own eyes. You see I have a lot of special knowledge which I apply to the problem, and which facilitates matters wonderfully. Those rules of deduction laid down in that article which aroused your scorn are invaluable to me in practical work. Observation with me is second nature. You appeared to be surprised when I told you, on our first meeting, that you had come from Afghanistan.”

“You were told, no doubt.”

“Nothing of the sort. I knew you came from Afghanistan. From long habit the train of thoughts ran so swiftly through my mind that I arrived at the conclusion without being conscious of intermediate steps. There were such steps, however. The train of reasoning ran, ‘Here is a gentleman of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor, then. He has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardship and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan.’ The whole train of thought did not occupy a second. I then remarked that you came from Afghanistan, and you were astonished.”