“Still, jealousy is a strange transformer of characters. Pray what is your own theory as to what took place?”
“Well, really, I came to seek a theory, not to propound one. I have given you all the facts. Since you ask me, however, I may say that it has occurred to me as possible that the excitement of this affair, the consciousness that she had made so immense a social stride, had the effect of causing some little nervous disturbance in my wife.”
“In short, that she had become suddenly deranged?”
“Well, really, when I consider that she has turned her back—I will not say upon me, but upon so much that many have aspired to without success—I can hardly explain it in any other fashion.”
“Well, certainly that is also a conceivable hypothesis,” said Holmes, smiling. “And now, Lord St. Simon, I think that I have nearly all my data. May I ask whether you were seated at the breakfast-table so that you could see out of the window?”
“We could see the other side of the road and the Park.”
“Quite so. Then I do not think that I need to detain you longer. I shall communicate with you.”
“Should you be fortunate enough to solve this problem,” said our client, rising.
“That is a detail which I shall speedily supply.”
Lord St. Simon shook his head. “I am afraid that it will take wiser heads than yours or mine,” he remarked, and bowing in a stately, old-fashioned manner, he departed.
“It is very good of Lord St. Simon to honor my head by putting it on a level with his own,” said Sherlock Holmes, laughing. “I think that I shall have a whiskey-and-soda and a cigar after all this cross-questioning. I had formed my conclusions as to the case before our client came into the room.”
“I have notes of several similar cases, though none, as I remarked before, which were quite as prompt. My whole examination served to turn my conjecture into a certainty. Circumstantial evidence is occasionally very convincing, as when you find a trout in the milk, to quote Thoreau’s example.”
“But I have heard all that you have heard.”
“Without, however, the knowledge of pre-existing cases which serves me so well. There was a parallel instance in Aberdeen some years back, and something on very much the same lines at Munich the year after the Franco-Prussian war. It is one of these cases—but, hello, here is Lestrade! Good-afternoon, Lestrade! You will find an extra tumbler upon the sideboard, and there are cigars in the box.”