![]() ![]() If Holmes's researches were successful, she would be an heiress. It was to take her at a disadvantage to obtrude love upon her at such a time. She was weak and helpless, shaken in mind and nerve. Yet there were two thoughts which sealed the words of affection upon my lips. ![]() I felt that years of the conventionalities of life could not teach me to know her sweet, brave nature as had this one day of strange experiences. My sympathies and my love went out to her, even as my hand had in the garden. She little guessed the struggle within my breast, or the effort of self-restraint which held me back. She has told me since that she thought me cold and distant upon that journey. In the cab, however, she first turned faint, and then burst into a passion of weeping,-so sorely had she been tried by the adventures of the night. After the angelic fashion of women, she had borne trouble with a calm face as long as there was some one weaker than herself to support, and I had found her bright and placid by the side of the frightened housekeeper. The police had brought a cab with them, and in this I escorted Miss Morstan back to her home. As it burned it filled the air with a subtle and aromatic odor. A lamp in the fashion of a silver dove was hung from an almost invisible golden wire in the centre of the room. Two great tiger-skins thrown athwart it increased the suggestion of Eastern luxury, as did a huge hookah which stood upon a mat in the corner. The carpet was of amber-and-black, so soft and so thick that the foot sank pleasantly into it, as into a bed of moss. The richest and glossiest of curtains and tapestries draped the walls, looped back here and there to expose some richly-mounted painting or Oriental vase. In that sorry house it looked as out of place as a diamond of the first water in a setting of brass. We were all astonished by the appearance of the apartment into which he invited us. An oasis of art in the howling desert of South London." A small place, miss, but furnished to my own liking. "Your servant, Miss Morstan," he kept repeating, in a thin, high voice. He held his open note-book upon his knee, and from time to time he jotted down figures and memoranda in the light of his pocket-lantern. Holmes alone could rise superior to petty influences. I could see from Miss Morstan's manner that she was suffering from the same feeling. I am not subject to impressions, but the dull, heavy evening, with the strange business upon which we were engaged, combined to make me nervous and depressed. Like all human kind, they flitted from the gloom into the light, and so back into the gloom once more. There was, to my mind, something eerie and ghost-like in the endless procession of faces which flitted across these narrow bars of light,-sad faces and glad, haggard and merry. The yellow glare from the shop-windows streamed out into the steamy, vaporous air, and threw a murky, shifting radiance across the crowded thoroughfare. Down the Strand the lamps were but misty splotches of diffused light which threw a feeble circular glimmer upon the slimy pavement. Mud-coloured clouds drooped sadly over the muddy streets. It was a September evening, and not yet seven o'clock, but the day had been a dreary one, and a dense drizzly fog lay low upon the great city. ![]()
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