The Professor At Home
I reproduce here, not in the order in which I first heard it but in the order in which it appears natural to set it down, what Mrs. Lyle told us on the Sunday afternoon in Paultons Square when Holmes had asked her, very civilly, to describe the household in which she had worked. I do so because it bears upon what followed, and because I find myself persuaded that no account of this affair would be complete which treated Professor Moriarty only as Holmes and I had previously known him — from the outside, as it were, and at the distance of his crimes. She had known him from the inside, at the distance of his tea-tray, and the picture she drew of him is the only one, of all the pictures of him known to me, in which he appears to have been, for certain hours of certain days, a private man.
"He kept," she said, "a quiet house. I mean the word in both senses. It was a house in Montague Street, of four rooms on the second floor, and a bedroom above, and a study at the back looking into a small walled garden in which a single fig tree grew. He had the whole floor to himself. The landlady was a Mrs. Dennison, to whom he was, I believe, unfailingly kind, and who believed until the day of his disappearance that he was a professor of pure mathematics at a college which I need not name. He paid her punctually in notes. He read to her, on Christmas Eve, from the Book of Luke, in which he