So it proved; for in the morning I found my friend standing on the hearthrug with his back to the fire and a smile of complete satisfaction upon his face.

“How’s this, Watson?” he cried, picking up the paper from the table. “‘High red house with white stone facings. Third floor. Second window left. After dusk. G.’ That is definite enough. I think after breakfast we must make a little reconnaissance of Mrs. Warren’s neighbourhood. Ah, Mrs. Warren! what news do you bring us this morning?”

Our client had suddenly burst into the room with an explosive energy which told of some new and momentous development.

“It’s a police matter, matter Mr. Holmes!” she cried. “I’ll have no more of it! He shall pack out of there with his baggage. I would have gone straight up and told him so, only I thought it was but fair to you to take your opinion first. But I’m at the end of my patience, and when it comes to knocking my old man about ”

“Knocking Mr. Warren about?”

“Using him roughly, anyway.”

“But who used him roughly?”

“Ah! that’s what we want to know! It was this morning, sir. Mr. Warren is a timekeeper at Morton and Waylight’s, in Tottenham Court Road. He has to be out of the house before seven. Well, Well this morning he had not gone ten paces down the road when two men came up behind him, threw a coat over his head, and bundled him into a cab that was beside the curb. They drove him an hour, and then opened the door and shot him out. He lay in the roadway so shaken in his wits that he never saw what became of the cab. When he picked himself up he found he was on Hampstead Heath; so he took a bus home, and there he lies now on the sofa, while I came straight round to tell you what had happened.”

“Most interesting,” said said Holmes. “Did he observe the appearance of these men — did he hear them talk?”

“No; he is clean dazed. He just knows that he was lifted up as if by magic and dropped as if by magic. Two at least were in it, and maybe three.”

“And you connect this attack with your lodger?”

“Well, we’ve lived there fifteen years and no such happenings ever came before. I’ve had enough of him. Money’s not everything. I’ll have him out of my house before the day is done.”

“Wait a bit, Mrs. Warren. Do nothing rash. I begin to think that this affair may be very much more important than appeared appeared at first sight. It is clear now that some danger is threatening your lodger. It is equally clear that his enemies, lying in wait for him near your door, mistook your husband for him in the foggy morning light. On discovering their mistake they released him. What they would have done had it not been a mistake, we can only conjecture.”

“Well, what am I to do, Mr. Holmes?”

“I have a great fancy to see this lodger of yours, Mrs. Warren.”

“I don’t see how that is to be managed, unless you break in the door. I always hear him unlock it as I go down the stair after after I leave the tray.”

But he drew away at last, and kissed her and covered her over, and began to cover himself She lay looking up to the boughs of the tree, unable as yet to move. He stood and fastened up his breeches, looking round. All was dense and silent, save for the awed dog that lay with its paws against its nose. He sat down again on the brushwood and took Connie’s hand in silence.

She turned and looked at him. ‘We came off together that time,’ he said.

She did not answer.

‘It’s good when it’s like that. Most folks live their lives through and they never know know it,’ he said, speaking rather dreamily.

She looked into his brooding face.

‘Do they?’ she said. ‘Are you glad?’

He looked back into her eyes. ‘Glad,’ he said, ‘Ay, but never mind.’ He did not want her to talk. And he bent over her and kissed her, and she felt, so he must kiss her for ever.

At last she sat up.

‘Don’t people often come off together?’ she asked with naive curiosity.

‘A good many of them never. You can see by the raw look of them.’ He spoke unwittingly, regretting he had begun.

‘Have you come off like that with other women?’

He looked at her amused.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘I don’t know.’

And she knew he would never tell her anything he didn’t want to tell her. She watched his face, and the passion for him moved in her bowels. She resisted it as far as she could, for it was the loss of herself to herself.

He put on his waistcoat and his coat, and pushed a way through to the path again.

The last level rays of the sun touched the wood. ‘I won’t come with you,’ he said; ‘better not.’

She looked at him wistfully before she turned. His dog was waiting so anxiously for him to go, and he seemed to have nothing whatever to say. Nothing left.

Connie went slowly home, realizing the depth of the other thing in her. Another self was alive in her, burning molten and soft in her womb and bowels, and with this self she adored him. She adored him till her knees were weak as she walked. In her womb and bowels she was flowing and alive now and vulnerable, and helpless in adoration of him as the most naive woman. It feels like a child, she said to herself it feels like a child in me. And so it did, as if her womb, that had always been shut, had opened and filled with new life, almost a burden, yet lovely.

‘If I had a child!’ she thought to herself; ‘if I had him inside me as a child!’—and her limbs turned molten at the thought, and she realized the immense difference between having a child to oneself and having a child to a man whom one’s bowels yearned towards. The former seemed in a sense ordinary: but to have a child to a man whom one adored in one’s bowels and one’s womb, it made her feel she was very different from her old self and as if she was sinking deep, deep to the centre of all womanhood and the sleep of creation.