An Envelope With No Postmark
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, as