A Widow Who Is Not
It was Holmes's habit, when he had arrived at a particular stage of a case, to place himself in the way of his adversary by means that were on the face of them entirely innocent. He called it, on one occasion, "walking the fox's cover" — a phrase I took to be drawn from his early years in the country, of which he almost never spoke. He did so now. On the morning following the Foreign Office affair, he announced that he intended to pay a call in Chelsea that afternoon, in a private capacity, and to take me with him.
"She is not at 11 Cheyne Row," I said.
"She is not. She is at 14A Paultons Square, where she has been for the better part of a year. The address is not a secret. It is merely, like so much else about her, unremarked. She knows that I shall come. She has known it since the moment she invited you, through a non-existent house, to come looking for her. She will now permit me the civility of finding her."
He had timed the visit, I noticed, for an hour at which any respectable woman of her supposed situation would be at home, and at which the neighbourhood would not be curious about a caller. Paultons Square was quiet. A nursemaid with two children was walking the plane trees. A baker's boy was delivering at a door on the north side. The house at 14A was neat, small, newly painted about the front door — not, I thought, the house of a widow in reduced circumstances, but