The Moriarty Correspondence

It has been, I find, a curious quality of my friend's returns that they reveal themselves first in small domestic disturbances rather than in any grand announcement. He had been back among us for not quite six weeks in the April of that year, and already the rooms at Baker Street had resumed the peculiar disorder that is his medium of thought. The chemical bench bore a fresh yellow stain where something had overflowed during the night; a half-finished monogram in tobacco-ash occupied one corner of the mantel; and the morning post, which Mrs. Hudson brought up at eight with her usual forbearance, was already the larger half of it addressed to the man whom the greater part of England still believed to be dead.

Holmes was at the window when she came in. He had been standing there for some time, without smoking, which is not his habit. The fog had not quite lifted off the paving, and the street-lamps burned still in a pale and useless way, and he was watching an errand boy retrace the same stretch of pavement for the third time, whistling a tune I could not place.

"Your letters, Mr. Holmes," said Mrs. Hudson. "And one that I cannot account for."

She set the small pile upon the breakfast cloth with the air of a woman who had already remarked its oddity to herself on the stairs. Holmes, who had turned at her voice, came forward and took up the top envelope between two fingers, asanother man might lift a specimen from a jar.

"Thank you, Mrs. Hudson," he said, without looking at her. "Was it placed in the box, or handed up?"

"Neither, sir. I found it on the table in the hall when I came through to lay the fire. I cannot say by whom it was brought, as the street door was locked at half past six, and I was in the kitchen from that hour. It had not been there when I passed at a quarter to seven. It had certainly been there at five past."

"Twenty minutes, then. Thank you. That is exact."

She withdrew, giving me, as she went out, the faintest lift of an eyebrow that I construed as an invitation to make sense of the thing on her behalf later, if I could. I was, in those weeks, still rediscovering the small habits of living with Holmes, and the small habits of being consulted by his household in his stead, and had not yet decided whether to welcome the resumption of either.

The envelope was of good cream laid paper, heavier than the morning's other correspondence, and bore no postmark of any kind. The direction was written in an upright, unjoined hand that I had never seen before — a hand that gave an impression less of character than of extraordinary care, each letter set down as though its writer distrusted habit. It read simply: Mr. Sherlock Holmes, 221B Baker Street, W. There was no stamp. There was no return address on the face of it. The seal was of common red wax without device.

Holmes turned the envelope over once, and then again, and then held it up to the light of the window. He did not, I noticed, break the seal at once.

"A woman's paper," he said, half to himself. "Though not a woman's hand. That is interesting already. No — a disguised hand, which is more interesting still. Observe the effort at anonymity, Watson. The writer has