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absolutely necessary to let the
family man of business – and my dear child – know that I was not
dead. How clever it was of you to trace me, Mr. Holmes,” she added,
shaking a finger at the detective. “Lionel was a sly one, and he
never managed that.”
    “Your husband – and the foreign police he
contacted over the years – paid far too much attention to the
country of origin of the stamps, and far too little to that of the
paper,” replied Holmes with a smile. “Paper and ink were definitely
of British manufacture. Moreover, they were always cheap, nothing
that a woman living the peripatetic life of the usual fashionable
Continental traveler – which your husband supposed you to be –
would use. Further, such a woman would not be sending letters from
such ports as Marseilles and Hamburg. So from the first my
attention was drawn to the East End. Though it was some weeks
before your daughter could return to Norfolk to find one of your
dolls to show me – as I had asked her to do from the first – she
had mentioned t the start of my investigation that you made them.
That – and your refusal to have money sent to you, by which you
could be traced – immediately suggested to me a means by which a
woman might make at least a bare living in hiding.”
    “And yet you told my husband nothing of
this?”
    Holmes was silent for a moment, gazing into
the fire. Mrs. Thorne had only come to the Settlement House as the
first shadows of evening had begun to fall, so John and Mr. Holmes
had been just finishing their dinner together – preparatory to a
long-promised evening talk about certain of Mr. Holmes’s early
cases which John hoped to write accounts of – when Martha had shown
Mrs. Thorne and me up the stairs.
    “Were I the perfectly analytical reasoner
Watson likes to make of me,” said Holmes slowly, “I suppose there
would be no reason for me not to keep Lionel Thorne absolutely
apprised of the progress of my search. One can tell a seamstress by
her left sleeve and a cobbler by his thumb, but the marks that evil
character leaves upon a man are less easily classified – perhaps
because, as Milton so brilliantly points out in the first cantos of Paradise Lost , wickedness takes on manifold forms, though
myself I have found that goodness bears as many shapes in the
world.”
    “Yet even a little street Arab like Ginger
Robinson,” I said softly, “guessed his intent was evil, without
knowing how he guessed.”
    “I must improve my acquaintance,” murmured
Holmes, “with young Mr. Robinson. Had I been the perfectly
cold-blooded and analytical reasoner that the Mr. Sherlock Holmes
of the tales appears to be, I would not have allowed mere prejudice
to influence me against the way the man looked aside when he spoke
of his wife, or the too-smooth accounts of her disappearance –
unblemished by the smallest hesitations of doubt as to its motives.
For your husband, Mrs. Thorne, is very good at appearing to act
from the best of motives.”
    “As I know,” said Mrs. Thorne, “to my
grief.”
    “And yet these things, like the weaver’s
tooth or the hostler’s right shoulder, are clues too, to which my
mind reacted. Very shortly after I began my researches in the East
End I became aware that I was being watched when I emerged from the
house. There are a number of criminals in London’s underworld who
might have reason to do that. But the next time Mr. Thorne came I
noticed the reddening on his cheeks and lips left by spirit gum
where he fastened his borrowed whiskers. As he did not mention the
use of a disguise to me I guessed that my pursuer was he. After
that I did what I could to shake him from the scent, but I fear
that he, too, was doing exactly as I was: searching for you among
the thronging humanity of those wretched streets. He showed quite
clearly what he meant to do with you when he found you at last,
trusting – quite accurately, I regret to surmise – that your death
would be put down to the