We had all been warned to appear before the magistrates upon the Thursday; but when the Thursday came there was no occasion for our testimony. A higher Judge had taken the matter in hand, and Jefferson Hope had been summoned before a tribunal where strict justice would be meted out to him. On the very night after his capture the aneurism burst, and he was found in the morning stretched upon the floor of the cell, with a placid smile upon his face, as though he had been able in his dying moments to look back upon a useful life, and on work well done.

“Gregson and Lestrade will be wild about his death,” Holmes remarked, as we chatted it over next evening. “Where will their grand advertisement be now?”

“I don’t see that they had very much to do with his capture,” I answered.

“What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence,” returned my companion, bitterly. “The question is, what can you make people believe that you have done? Never mind,” he continued, more brightly, after a pause. “I would not have missed the investigation for anything. There has been no better case within my recollection. Simple as it was, there were several most instructive instructive points about it.”

“Simple!” I ejaculated.

“Well, really, it can hardly be described as otherwise,” said Sherlock Holmes, smiling at my surprise. “The proof of its intrinsic simplicity is, that without any help save a few very ordinary deductions I was able to lay my hand upon the criminal within three days.”

“That is true,” said I.

“I have already explained to you that what is out of the common is usually a guide rather than a hindrance. In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backward. That is a very useful accomplishment, and a very easy one, but people do not practise it much. In the everyday affairs of life it is more useful to reason forward, and so the other comes to be neglected. There are fifty who can reason synthetically for one who can reason analytically.”

“I confess,” said I, “that I do not quite follow you.”

“I hardly expected that you would. Let me see if I can make it clearer. Most people, if you describe a train of events to them will tell you what the result would be. They can put those events together in their minds, and argue from them that something will come to pass. There are few people, however, who, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that result. This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning backward, or analytically. ”

“I understand,” said I.

“Now this was a case in which you were given the result and had to find everything else for yourself. Now let me endeavour to show you the different steps in my reasoning. To begin at the beginning. I approached the house, as you know, on foot, and with my mind entirely free from all impressions. I naturally began by examining the roadway, and there, as I have already explained to you, I saw clearly the marks of a cab, which, I ascertained by inquiry, must have been there during the night. I satisfied myself that it was a cab and not a private carriage by the narrow gauge of the wheels. The ordinary London growler is considerably less wide than a gentleman’s brougham.

‘You are not married at all, are you?’ he asked.

She looked full at him.

‘Not in the least,’ she replied, in her measured way. Loerke laughed, wrinkling up his face oddly. There was a thin wisp of his hair straying on his forehead, she noticed that his skin was of a clear brown colour, his hands, his wrists. And his hands seemed closely prehensile. He seemed like topaz, so strangely brownish and pellucid.

‘Good,’ he said.

Still it needed some courage for him to go on.

‘Was Mrs Birkin your sister?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘And was SHE married?’

‘She was married.’

‘Have you parents, then?’

‘Yes,’ said Gudrun, ‘we have parents.’

And she told him, briefly, laconically, her position. He watched her closely, curiously all the while.

‘So!’ he exclaimed, with some surprise. ‘And the Herr Crich, is he rich?’

‘Yes, he is rich, a coal owner.’

‘How long has your friendship with him lasted?’

‘Some months.’

There was a pause.

‘Yes, I am surprised,’ he said at length. ‘The English, I thought they were so—cold. And what do you think to do when you leave here?’

‘What do I think to do?’ she repeated.

‘Yes. You cannot go back to the teaching. No—’ he shrugged his shoulders—‘that is impossible. Leave that to the CANAILLE who can do nothing else. You, for your part—you know, you are a remarkable woman, eine seltsame Frau. Why deny it—why make any question of it? You are an extraordinary woman, why should you follow the ordinary course, the ordinary life?’

Gudrun sat looking at her hands, flushed. She was pleased that he said, so simply, that she was a remarkable woman. He would not say that to flatter her—he was far too self–opinionated and objective by nature. He said it as he would say a piece of sculpture was remarkable, because he knew it was so.

And it gratified her to hear it from him. Other people had such a passion to make everything of one degree, of one pattern. In England it was chic to be perfectly ordinary. And it was a relief to her to be acknowledged extraordinary. Then she need not fret about the common standards.

‘You see,’ she said, ‘I have no money whatsoever.’

‘Ach, money!’ he cried, lifting his shoulders. ‘When one is grown up, money is lying about at one’s service. It is only when one is young that it is rare. Take no thought for money—that always lies to hand.’

‘Does it?’ she said, laughing.

‘Always. The Gerald will give you a sum, if you ask him for it—’

She flushed deeply.

‘I will ask anybody else,’ she said, with some difficulty—‘but not him.’

Loerke looked closely at her.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Then let it be somebody else. Only don’t go back to that England, that school. No, that is stupid.’