I have no very clear memory of how I filled up the rest of the day. It was always difficult for me to concentrate after one of my occasional battles with Holmes, and accustomed as I was to hear him mock my intellectual limitations the violence with which he had turned upon me, and the intensity of his passion, had rather stunned me. When I at length made my way home at dinner-time, Holmes was out; nor did he return later that evening. Not without misgivings, I finally gave up on him and went to bed, where I had vague and unpleasant dreams involving Inspector Lestrade administering my board exams, during which I could not demonstrate a grasp of the most basic knowledge of anatomy. I was therefore less annoyed than I might have been to find myself shaken awake by Holmes, who was standing in the dark at the head of my bed.

"Good heavens, Holmes, what has happened? What time is it?"

"Nothing, and slightly after midnight." He paused, and laid one pale hand gently on my arm. "I only wanted to apologize for my outburst this morning. You are in no way responsible for the nightmare I am presently inhabiting, and it was wrong of me to vent my frustration on the one human being who has never done me a wrong or had a complaint to make. I hope you will forgive me."

This really was becoming alarming. The last time he had apologized to me was for nearly killing both of us in an experiment intended to test the effects on humans of radix pedis diaboli. I sat bolt upright.

"Of course I forgive you. Please say no more about it. But for God's sake, Holmes, why cannot you just tell me what you want me to know? I am sure that if your client knew how much affected you have been by this case he would release you from this oppressive vow of silence."

A sad smile gleamed briefly in the darkness. He patted my arm once and withdrew his hand. "It is more complicated than you imagine," he said. "But I can promise you at least that by tomorrow morning it will all be over, for better or worse." He turned to go, and I saw another, more metallic gleam in the darkness.

"Holmes," I ejaculated, "is that my revolver in your pocket?"

"Surely you don't mind my borrowing it, Watson," he answered. "I may need it. I'll have it back by morning."

I threw back the covers and sprang out of bed. "I'm coming with you."

"No!" His voice, commanding and imperative as always, froze me where I stood. "Watson, this one time, and this one time only, I categorically forbid you to come. If you attempt to follow me I shall know, and I warn you that if you do from that moment onward we are no longer friends. I tell you this for your own good," he said, relenting somewhat. "It is far too dangerous an expedition."

"Then it is too dangerous for you."

"I have no time for this," he retorted imperiously. "I will return before morning, and you will wait for me here. Sleep well." Before I could stop him he was out the door.

For several seconds, I considered actually honoring his request. Then I dressed as quickly as I could and slipped out the door no more than a minute after Holmes had passed through it. He had enjoined me to stay behind; but he had not asked for my explicit promise, and I had not given it. Whatever the reasons were behind this extraordinary secrecy, I was convinced that they could not justify the toll it had taken on him. Besides, if he was risking bodily harm or even death, as I had every reason to believe he was, my place was at his side. It was no light thing for me to thus flout his instructions and thwart his will, but the consequences would have to take care of themselves. In the name of loyalty if nothing else I owed it to him, and to myself, to disobey him.

I had learned enough about shadowing a suspect to track him easily. Ordinarily I have no doubt he would have detected me immediately, but he was too intent on his mission, and no doubt too confident in my unquestioning submission to his wishes, to take more than cursory precautions, which I was able to circumvent. We were headed for the East End, and we were in for a long walk. Tramping after him through the crusted snow and ice lining the curbs, avoiding the lit circles under the gas lamps and skulking in the shadows with the rats and derelicts, I began to feel as if I myself were the criminal whose track he was following, and that he was pursuing me instead of vice versa. It was an uncomfortable sensation to have among the reeking dens and squalid shanties of the East End, and one which did not appreciably abate as I saw him stop in an ill-lit doorway and ring the bell.

The house was actually better-built than most of its neighbours, and must once have been a respectable dwelling before the influx of immigrants from the outlying reaches of the Empire had claimed this part of London and sent the previous residents flying to more exclusive districts. From what little I could see by the gaslight the building had been kept in some sort of repair, and when the door was opened it was by a thin, stooping man with the respectable black clothes and deferential tones of a genteel butler.

"Good evening, Hastings," said Holmes.

"Why, Mr. S," replied the other figure, "we weren't expecting you tonight."

"I didn't think it would matter."

"We're always pleased to have your custom, of course," he said politely. "It's just that I'm afraid Tony is engaged right now."

"Dear me, that is unfortunate."

"But if you would care to wait in the drawing room--"

"Thank you, that will do nicely." He passed through the arch and the door slammed shut behind him.

Holmes might have had the luxury of waiting in a drawing room, albeit one not likely to be figured in the pages of the Illustrated London News. I, however, spent the interval crouched in the cold and damp between two rubbish bins in an alleyway that abutted the rear of the house, trying vainly to discern what sort of establishment this was. I thought first of the cocaine-bottle, but a habit I had known of for years could hardly necessitate this elaborate deception. He was here on a different errand altogether, one which required the participation of the Tony on whose leisure both of us were waiting. Surely Tony could not be his mysterious client? From where I hid I had a clear view of most of the rear windows, but those that were not unlit had heavy blinds drawn, and I could make out nothing save for a vague movement of blurred shadows on the other side. The windows had been closed and muffled against the winter draughts, so that no sound escaped to give me any hint of what was taking place behind them. I was beginning to lose heart when to my great relief I heard a sash fly up,and the clear, familiar voice of my friend proceeding from it.

"You don't mind if I open the window, do you? I prefer a bit of a draught."

"It's news to me," answered a second voice, in which an unmistakably working-class accent combined with an attempt at genteel intonation, "but if you don't mind I don't."

"Nor any objection to my turning up the gas?" Apparently not, for a light glowed in one of the windows, and the sharp outline of Holmes's aquiline nose and well-defined chin was silhouetted against it.

"You're in one of your moods tonight, aren't you?" was the good-humored reply. Behind Holmes's shadow, I could see another figure moving about in the room.

"Just a little," he answered with a light laugh. "I'm not a patient man, as you know."

"I'm sorry for the delay," responded the other. "If you had arranged in advance--" Holmes's hand waved in a gesture of dismissal. "It is tiresome. But," he continued, as his broader, squarer silhouette joined Holmes's as he stood looking out the window, "you must realize you're not the only man in London who wants to play Holmes and Watson."

It is still difficult for me to describe, even at a distance of several years, the effect those words pronounced by that voice and in that setting had on me. It was not that I exactly understood, in any intellectual sense, what was transpiring in that cheap upstairs room. A kind of physical apprehension, almost an animal sensation of danger and fear raised the hair on the back of my neck and icy fingers of dread closed around my heart. I knew that if I did not get up from that spot and flee this place of evil, some calamity would overtake me, and my life would be forever altered. But I also knew that for all his assumed levity and studied indifference, Holmes was in desperate danger. And I could not abandon him. Not even to save myself from whatever terrible fate was hovering in the darkness above me.

"No," said Holmes quietly. "I don't suppose I am."

The other man put a heavy hand on his shoulder. "You're tired, Holmes," he pronounced in a voice that had suddenly lost all trace of its accent and assumed the rounded vowels and careful consonants of a member of the professional classes.

"Yes," he answered, turning his head to face his companion. "You are right; I have been rather too hard on myself recently."

"Why don't you come to bed," replied the other, as the shadow of his moustached, square-jawed head hovered mere inches away from Holmes's, "and let me be hard on you for a change."

Holmes laughed and brought a hand up to stroke the other man's jaw.

"Rather simple," he responded, "and much too vulgar. But keep it up," he continued, moving closer and dropping his voice. "It reminds me of who you are not."

"You're a strange bird, Holmes," said the other, as the shadow of his head merged with that of my friend's.

Why should I go on? From my hiding-place and at that distance I could not see everything, but I saw, and moreover heard, enough. Crouching in that miserable alley, I heard my name--and his--called out in any number of tones of voice, interspersed with dialogue that ran like a grotesque parody of one of my own chronicles. Why should I describe the contortions of the shadows that the lamp still occasionally threw into the opening of the window, or the inarticulate sounds proceeding from it, or the sacrilegious uses to which both the vocabulary and the implements of my profession were put? It is enough to say that within moments it was quite clear to me with what purpose Holmes had repaired to this den, and why he had so adamantly insisted that I should not follow him.

And yet, despite all the horror and revulsion this spectacle held for me, I did not stir. For the better part of an hour I squatted there, rooted--by what? By the memory of his face in the darkness at my bedside, of the passion in his voice that morning--by the pain my ears could still detect even in these nocturnal cries. He was in danger. That I knew. And shivering in the mire and slush beneath that lighted window, I was beginning to know a number of other things.

It was now clear, for instance, that his reluctance to visit me after my marriage had not derived from a personal dislike of poor Mary. I took comfort in that, at least. And a thousand other memories, trivial and momentous alike, were thronging into my mind, all taking on entirely new connotations. The longer I huddled there in the darkness, the more I was beginning to agree with Holmes's assessment of my intellectual abilities. I really had been remarkably dense. For a remarkably long time.

And if the truth be told, was it only Holmes who I had failed to understand? Why had I always been ready to neglect my practice, my health and--if I am honest--even my marriage for the chance to accompany him on one of his adventures? Why had I fainted dead away when he rose up miraculously alive on the other side of my desk that afternoon just a few months ago? And could the devotion of a friend, or even the admiration of a pupil, really explain why for those three long years of his absence one day in every spring had found me in Switzerland standing on that ledge of evil memory shedding tears into the Reichenbach Falls?

I was very much afraid that, dense as I was, I might now know the answers to some of these questions. But looking up at that window, and imagining the scene within, revulsion began once again to be my dominant emotion. I had always seen him as the purest example of intellectual prowess and analytical power--whatever my feelings for him were, I had never imagined him in anything like this fashion. That he should be driven to come to this sordid place to enact whatever twisted stories he was dreaming up about me with a hired professional--that he had been returning from this place to our rooms in Baker Street and facing me, with this in his memory, as if nothing out of the ordinary had taken place--it was too much. I knew I could never have resorted to so horrible an expedient, no matter how much--no matter how long...

It seemed like an eternity before I saw Holmes, once again dressed and silhouetted against the lamp, turn his angular bird like head to ask, "Shall we call it an hour? The rates haven't gone up, have they?"

"You can settle on Friday, same as always," was the response. The accent had melted as abruptly as it had been assumed.

"I don't think I should," Holmes answered, the strain telling in his high, nervous intonation. "I shan't be back."

"I'm sorry to hear that," said the other, with apparent sincerity.

"I'm sure you are," he answered with a rueful laugh. "I may not be your only repeat customer, but I've no doubt I'm the most reliable."

The light went out and the sash slammed to. I remained frozen to my spot, thinking over what I had seen and heard. It was some moments before I fully came to appreciate the vital importance of getting back to Baker Street before Holmes did.

Abandoning any attempt at concealment, I hurried up the street as quickly as I could, hoping that I would be able somehow to overtake him without his noticing. I was somewhat perturbed when after several minutes I had not yet seen him ahead of me. It was possible that I had taken a wrong turning. I was considering stopping and doubling back when the hiss and glare of a struck match caught my attention. Standing with his back to a gas lamp a few yards in front of me, holding a pipe in one hand and the match in the other, looking straight at me, was Sherlock Holmes.

"Well, Watson," he said. "What now?"

The brim of his cap threw a shadow that hid his eyes, and the voice was deliberately calm and steady. But the flame wavered erratically through the night as he tried, without success, to light his pipe with badly shaking hands. And suddenly it was all so absurdly simple.

"My dear Holmes," I cried, stretching my own hands out to steady his, "come home with me and you shall tell me all about it."

"God bless you, Watson," he said in a breaking voice.

Whether he had collapsed, or I had moved toward him, or both, the next moment found my arms around his shaking, weak form, and his head on my shoulder as a kind of high, over-wrought sigh shuddered from his lungs.

Supporting him on my arm, I set off up the street. By some miracle there was a cab passing through that quarter at this unholy hour, into which I bundled Holmes. As the wheels rattled over the uneven pavement he gradually returned to something approaching his usual demeanor.

"You knew I would follow you," I said.

"I thought you probably would." Despite everything he smiled wanly. "Of course I saw immediately that you had. You really must make more of an effort at concealment when--"

"Damn it, Holmes, I'm tired of it."

He sank back into the cushions. "Of course you are," he said dully. "You've every right to be."

"There was no client, of course," I continued.

Holmes chuckled dryly. "Everything I said to you was quite true, in its own way. I did have the strongest possible objections to your involvement."

"How long has this blackguard Athanson had his claws in you?"

"For the past eighteen days. I won't bore you with the details. You can appreciate my anxiety when he insisted you be present. Of course he only did so because he knew I would be in agony. Mr. Athanson is not a very successful thief but he has a genius for cruelty, in his own small way."

"But why did you not simply tell me?"

A short, bitter bark of laughter escaped him. "Watson, whatever your other shortcomings may be, no one could ever accuse you of wanting imagination. Put yourself, then, in my place." He fixed his eyes on the empty space before him with a deep sigh. "Since your earliest recollection you have been ill at ease in the company of most other human beings. Save for one brother who lives immersed in his own fantasy world, you have no family living that you care to acknowledge. Through one of those tremendous coincidences which contrive to make even an empiricist like yourself suspect the existence of a greater plan and a higher providence, you have stumbled across another man whose temperament is, while entirely dissimilar, congenial to yours and who, for reasons that remain a mystery, becomes fond of you."

His hands dangled listlessly from his wrists, swaying gently to and fro with the motion of the cab as he lost himself in his reverie. The sound of his voice, the lateness of the hour, and the reaction to the emotional strain I had been under combined to make me feel, too, as if I was dreaming, hovering suspended and bodiless in this strange dark space. "This friendship soon becomes the single most important element of your life. As you find yourself going to greater lengths to seek his company, you are more than ever touched by the warmth of his affection and the simplicity of his devotion. Then," he added, "you stare over a cliff with your mortal enemy's fingers about your throat, and in the moment before your final plunge into oblivion you think of him and are seized with a regret so intense and heartbreaking that you pray death does take you, and take you instantly. Unfortunately, you survive."

He heaved another of those troubled sighs. "Three haunted years later, you return to your previous life by the side of your old friend. But now your affection has taken a shape that in all his decent, upright life this man has never imagined was possible. You dare not speak to him and risk losing his regard. Yet to be with him, and not be with him, is driving you mad. You can find no solution to this problem. One evil night your criminal researches take you into a vicious part of town where you discover what, in your desperation, appears to be a palliative, if not a cure." He shook his head. "Now, imagine walking into the home you share and saying to the man whose good opinion means more to you than the hyperbolic accolades of the press, Parliament and the crowned heads of Europe--the kind, straightforward, loyal man upon whose open heart and generous nature you have been imposing for fourteen years, 'Watson, not only have I been dreaming for years of doing things to you that would shock your conscience, turn your stomach, and outrage your medical sensibilities, I have for the past month been paying a male prostitute to impersonate you while I do them to him.'"

Not knowing what to say, I laid a hand gently on his shoulder.

The cab jolted around a curb and flung both of us violently into one corner. The sudden movement broke the almost trance-like mood in which both of us had been wrapped. His eyes flew open and with sudden terror he shrank away from me to the opposite end of the seat. I remained planted where I was, not more than a foot distant from him, watching him struggle to regain his composure.

"Holmes ... I would have..."

He shook his head violently. "I could not do it, Watson."

"Yet you deliberately led me out here to witness this."

"I have always found it easier--and more effective--to show first, and tell afterward."

In spite of myself I smiled, remembering the effect of his demonstrations on Lestrade and the other baffled detectives who had been subjected to them. "Indeed," I said pointedly, "by using that method, as you have said, one can produce a startling, though possibly a meretricious, effect."

The husky note in my voice was as much a surprise to me as it was to him.

"Watson," he breathed, shrinking if possible farther into the angle of the cab, "what can you mean?"

"You vain, arrogant, self-absorbed devil," I said, as gently as I could, "in all this time did you never pause to wonder whether it was possible--just possible--that I was not utterly transparent?" He blinked. "That there might be something in my character that you might not perceive? That perhaps my affections, too, might have developed ... complications?"

"You can't mean it," he burst out. "You--a married man--"

"A widower--"

"Nevertheless--"

"I loved Mary," I declared with all the fervor of my roused soul, "and she, God help her, loved me, and if she had been spared to me we should not now be having this conversation. But she knew from the beginning what I know now--that I belonged to you before I met her, and that happen what may I am and will be bound to you still." Holmes's hawklike features emerged slightly from the darkness of the corner, eyes shining with what looked like eagerness but also like fear. "Holmes," I cried, "I am, as usual, in the dark. I do not understand any of this. I do not understand myself anymore than I understand you. I understand one thing only."

"Then for pity's sake enlighten me," Holmes groaned, "I understand nothing."

Language and thought at this moment deserted me utterly, as I might have expected they would. But I am a man of action. I flung my arms about his slim, hard shoulders and crushed my mouth down upon his quivering lips.

I cannot describe my exact sensations. I am not sure that I remember them. I do remember having just time, just before the horses clattered to a halt outside our door, to remark to myself that I was probably one of only three or four human beings who had ever really surprised Sherlock Holmes.

I clambered out and stood stamping my still-numbed feet on the curb while Holmes paid the driver. I was aware that I was blushing furiously, and that other symptoms were liable to manifest themselves very shortly. As I was looking studiously up the street willing myself into quiescence, with no very great success, I felt his thin, eager hand grasp my arm.

"Come, Watson," he said.

I turned to look at him. The same fever that was heating my blood burned across his high, sharp cheekbones.

We rushed up the steps and into the entry with, I fear, little regard for the noise we made. There was an interminable moment of suspense while Holmes struggled to turn the key in the lock, and then we burst in and slammed the door shut behind us.

The sight of our familiar apartment, which we had shared for so long in perfect amity, had a chilling effect on both of us. While I stood stock-still with my back to the closed door, Holmes advanced slowly to the mantel and lifted his meerschaum off its stand with infinite care and tenderness.

"It will never be the same, Watson." There was a note of sadness, and more than a hint of apprehension, in his voice.

"So be it," was my vehement reply.

Holmes dropped the pipe to the floor and took two strides to the spot to which my terrified anticipation had momentarily fixed me. For the brief time he took to reach me I contemplated with horror the risk of ruin, disgrace and calamity that was approaching along with him. And then, relaxing in the powerful but tender grip of those eager, wiry arms, as those sensitive hands guided my face toward his waiting mouth, everything else faded to insignificance.

"Watson," he whispered, "think--be sure--don't let your loyalty lead you into pretending--"

"I have been waiting for this moment since 1882," I interrupted. "If you delay it for another instant I shall--"

I never formed the end of the sentence. For several minutes thereafter, in fact, conversation was impossible. I was busy discovering that my friend's fine, trembling fingers could be as articulate as his tongue, and I daresay he was adding a few notes to the mental casefile I knew he was keeping open on me. When next I was able to speak, I was lying half-naked on Holmes's narrow bed, looking up at him and suddenly feeling both nervous and vaguely ashamed of what I was about to say. And yet it was perfectly reasonable. "Holmes," I panted, "you mustn't think me callous--"

"What is it, Watson?"

"But--your associate in the East End--" It hurt him to hear me refer to it, and I ached for him when I saw it, but I had to go on. "Holmes, we don't know where he's been."

To my surprise he laughed. "Watson, I should think this late in the day you would have more respect for my intelligence. You don't seriously believe I would neglect to take precautions?"

"You are careless of your health in every other respect--"

"Oh, really, Watson. I am, I confess, a deviant, a cocaine fiend, and a freak of nature, but I am not yet a suicidal maniac. Even if I were I should choose a method other than syphilis with which to make away my life."

"Well then," I said, putting my arms around his long white neck, "you may as well pursue your investigation."

Dawn broke at some point during the next hour but I never noticed. Fourteen years of suppressed emotion and frustrated desire were rushing out of me like water through a dam, and I floated helplessly along in the current, awash in a sense of release unlike anything I could have imagined. When Holmes's face reappeared next to mine, flushed with triumph but at the same time wordlessly anxious, I could only look back at him in wonder.

"I know you have been rehearsing--" I began.

He shook his head. "Pray put that idea out of your mind. Nothing on earth could have prepared me for this."

"I believe you," I said, my breath finally beginning to be more regular.

"You look pensive, Watson," he said after a long pause.

"One thing is troubling me."

"My dear fellow--I suppose I could be wrong, but from the evidence you furnished I inferred that you found it--"

"And as always, your inference was correct," I hastened to assure him. "But I do feel I ought to reciprocate..."

With a smile he sat back on his heels, resting his quiet hands on my bare chest. "By all means."

I sat up awkwardly. "But Holmes ... I've never ... I have no idea how..."

"Never mind, Watson," he said softly. "Neither did I."

Holmes stroked my hair gently, but my anxiety mounted. He must have noticed, for he sat back expectantly as a wicked smile tweaked his reddened lips.

"Come, Watson," he said in his old abrupt and hectoring fashion. "Didn't they teach you anything in the British Army?"

Somehow hearing him taunting me again put me more at ease. "I'm afraid the other medical officers considered this sort of thing unhygienic."

"Well, Watson, no matter," he said in the most conversational and offhand manner, shrugging indifferently as he lay back upon the rumpled bedclothes. "You know my methods. Apply them."

Laughing--at first--I did my best. It was a challenge, as I had thought it might be, for even in these circumstances his compulsion to observe and to analyze threatened to overrule every other. After patiently putting up with his no doubt well-meant suggestions and directions, I was thus all the more gratified when his verbal commentary became more incoherent and disjointed, and finally disappeared altogether in a cacophony of inarticulate sounds that I had never heard him or any other human being make before, even from my hiding place outside that fateful window. Overcome, and more than a little frightened of what I had wrought, I sought his eyes again.

"Well, Holmes?"

In his reveries, those slow, languid moods that alternated with his spurts of activity, I had seen something like this blurred and satiated gaze, but nothing quite this extreme. For several long seconds we looked at each other. Finally I prompted him.

"What do you think, Holmes?"

"I can't think," he murmured, closing his eyes with a sigh of inexpressible contentment. "I mean that quite literally. I believe you have blown my mind." The eyes opened, their preternatural serenity now lightened with a spark of humor. "So to speak." And then, with a sincerity that brought tears to my eyes, "Thank you."

"You know it is my greatest pleasure to serve you," I said.

His eyes were bright with unshed tears and his lips parted as if he were going to say something. Then the veil of humor dropped over his eyes and he spoke softly, but quite distinctly, into my ear.

"Now that really is an appalling thing to hear," he said. "We must try and see if human existence, imperfect and ephemeral as it is, might not hold greater pleasures for you."

Two and a half hours later, I was quite certain that it did. My joy was nonetheless tempered when, as the morning sun shone in through the curtains of the sitting room where we lay sprawled prone upon the carpet, I saw the toll that our voyage of discovery had taken on our surroundings.

"Holmes," I said, "we have made a terrible mess of Mrs. Hudson's tea service."

"I'm sure she wouldn't begrudge it to us," he yawned.

"There is tobacco in your hair."

"Best place for it," he drawled, closing his eyes and wrapping his lean body around my stockier form.

"And--oh dear. Oh my goodness. Holmes, do you remember when you last saw your violin?"

In an instant he was on his feet and combing through the jumble of discarded clothing, displaced objects and spilled foodstuffs that seemed to constitute most of the sitting room. It was fully two minutes before he lifted his head and saw the violin resting safely on the mantel.

"Watson," he cried, advancing on me with a menacing grin, "you put it up there yourself, I distinctly remember it."

"Bless me! So I must have."

"I can see I shall have to be more careful around you from now on," he laughed, encircling my waist and bending his head over mine.

"Or less," I brought out, realizing with disbelief that my blood was once again rising.

"Holmes," I ventured, after another hour or so had elapsed.

"Mm?"

"We are forgetting something."

"If there's another position you'd--"

"Be serious for a moment, Holmes," I said, as he turned over on his back. "What are we to do about Athanson?"

"Let him publish and be damned." His arms tightened around me as he laid his head on my breast. "Now that you know he can do me no harm."

"Not in that sense," I said, "but really, Holmes, this is very dangerous. If he chooses to inform the police they will have to act. They convicted Oscar Wilde, and they could certainly--Holmes, do let my moustache alone, I'm trying to speak to you."

"I'm sorry, Watson," he said, withdrawing his hand with a look of highly insincere remorse. "I must control my depraved urges."

"You needn't do that. But we now have less than twenty-four hours to confound him and I can't see how it's to be done."

With a groan of annoyance he pushed his exhausted body into a seated position. "Watson, after last night's performance you really cannot expect energy from me. There are limits to even my stamina."

"What I don't understand is how he got this information in the first place."

"Oh, there are a hundred ways for a professional blackmailer to get his hands on this sort of thing. Every house like that has its informants. I shouldn't be surprised if Tony was one of them."

"But Athanson isn't a professional blackmailer. He's a banker."

"True enough. But even you, if you will recall, were able to determine that I was spending my nights in the East End without being a professional blackmailer."

"But that's only because I was in the area myself and happened to--good gracious, Holmes, what is the matter?"

His body had gone taut with some sudden comprehension and he was clutching his hair with a cry of vexation.

"I cannot believe I have been so blind," he shouted. "This is what comes of emotional excitement, Watson. It should have been obvious from the start. Naturally I always took steps to avoid anyone who might be following me. He could not have had me shadowed. But if he happened to be in the same place at the same time--"

"He must be a customer too."

"We have him, Watson, we have him!" he cried, leaping to his feet and dashing about the room in search of a pen and paper. "If he has been to the place only once or twice this may be no use but I fancy Mr. Athanson is the genuine, full-blown deviant personality. And he is married with two children, the fool!" He scribbled a note on a scrap of foolscap and rang the bell for Mrs. Hudson. "Once I send this note--"

"Holmes," I interjected as I heard the tread of approaching feet, "hadn't we better dress?"

It was a mark of how far we had both come, I suppose, that until that moment we had forgotten that we were both stark naked. Holmes hunted frantically for something to cover himself with, while I seized the nearest piece of clothing and threw it on, noticing just as the door opened to admit Mrs. Hudson that it was one of Holmes's dressing-gowns.

"Good morning, Doctor Watson," she said, taking in the state of the sitting room, and my own state of undress, without appearing to turn a hair. "Did you want breakfast?"

"Ah, no, Mrs. Hudson," said Holmes apologetically, who had leapt into a pair of my trousers a moment beforehand. "No, I just wondered if you might send the boy with this note, and ask him to bring back the reply as quickly as he can. Do you think you can spare him?"

"Why, of course, Mr. Holmes," she answered with her usual placid good-humor. "But what about the breakfast? Surely you don't intend to face the day with an empty stomach."

"Yes," I said, despite Holmes's silent objections, "I think we should like some, if it wouldn't put you out."

"Oh, it's no trouble, I was just putting the kettle on," she answered. "Back in a moment." And she was gone.

Holmes and I looked at each other. Then, simultaneously, we burst out laughing.

"She must have known," I said, wonderingly.

"My dear fellow," Holmes answered, collapsing weakly onto the settee as he shook with laughter, "it is obvious, is it not, that she has 'known' for years."

"I wish she'd told me," I muttered.

"Nevertheless," he replied, "we really had better dress before she comes back. Although you do look magnificent in that dressing-gown."

"I am sorry to say that you look utterly ridiculous in my trousers."

"Ah well," he shrugged, climbing out of them. "Any port in a storm, Watson."