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all-too-true facts, and Erich was a maestro.”
    Mr. Holmes actually extended a hand to help her up, but Irene filled it with the handle of the mysterious black case and leaped up as if she were the magical rabbit, with no sense of effort or strain, and certainly no consciousness that a gentleman should assist a woman in all things.
    Her face was radiantly pink after the effort of unearthing the black case from her treasure trove of forgotten fabrics. I winced to see her looking so happy and pretty in front of Mr. Holmes.
    Yet he had eyes only for the case.
    I saw, now that it was unveiled, that it was a pear-shaped violin case.
    “Irene!” I couldn’t help exclaiming. “I’ve never seen such a thing in your possession before. Has it always resided in your trunk?”
    “I almost forgot about it myself, Nell. The poor old maestro left it in my care as a parting gift, and it soon was lost beneath the flea-market fabrics. I suspect that this old violin is a rather good one. Is it, Mr. Holmes?”
    He had laid the object atop the piano and opened the case, almost as slowly as he had explored the poison-bearing cigarette case on an earlier occasion when we had been forced to accept his presence.
    Then, he had saved Irene’s life.
    Now, he attempted to preserve the integrity of an obviously old object.
    I glimpsed dusty and flattened rose velvet and flabby leather hinges.
    Irene gazed into the case like a child at Christmas, all the actress’s artful composure fled, her hand at her mouth as if to hold in excitement, her coiffure trailing loosened tendrils.
    “Is it good?” she asked again, clearly unable to wait for a verdict.
    Sherlock Holmes was occupying some other place or time. His face lost its habitual hawkish cast. Suddenly I glimpsed the boy in him, the boy at Christmas who did not have many heartfelt presents, and none that spoke to his secret soul. I knew this in my governess’s heart, and, as much as I feared the man, even more, for this moment, I pitied the boy. My throat grew suddenly thick.
    He neither saw nor noted my reaction, or even Irene’s. He lifted the instrument from the case . . . up, up to the light of the window. So a dipsomaniac might hoist of glass of claret, holding it poised on the fingertips of both hands, as if a touch might turn it to powder.
    He sighted down its length both front and back like a hunter weighing a field piece. He peered into its recesses, bent to study the faded velvet. Said nothing.
    “Perhaps Amati?” Irene prompted.
    “No.”
    “Surely not Stradivarius.”
    “No.”
    “Then it is worthless. How sad. I had hoped for the maestro’s sake it was not.”
    “A Guarneri.”
    I couldn’t resist breaking the strange spell that enwrapped them and disquieted me. “Is that a dread disease, pray tell? Like tuberculosis?”
    “The Guarneris were a family of violin makers active from the sixteenth into the eighteenth centuries,” Mr. Holmes answered me with equanimity. “They were instrumental geniuses of the first water, though their violins are no longer as well known as the Stradivarius or Amati to the general public.”
    Well, I had never been labeled “the general public” before!
    He finally glanced at Irene. I had the oddest feeling that he hadn’t dared to do so before.
    She awaited his verdict with an annoying air of suspense. Surely there were better appraisers of violins in France than this visiting Englishman! I think what annoyed me most was that she welcomed his verdict, that she was most sincerely interested in it.
    “Guarneri,” she repeated. “You are right. I am not familiar with that name. Is it . . . playable?”
    “It has been abominably neglected.”
    “I am not a violinist.”
    “The strings are brittle and the wood weeps for oiling.”
    “That shall be repaired as soon as possible. I had forgotten it, you see.”
    “You are a musician. How could you have forgotten an instrument of this rank?”
    “I am both a musician and my own