What The Letters Taught Me
Holmes did not speak on the journey back to Baker Street. He smoked two cigarettes in the cab, and tipped the driver, when we alighted, rather more than was his habit, which was a small and infallible sign of the particular kind of absorption in which he then was. We went up. Mrs. Hudson, who had kept a fire burning for us in my friend's absence, gave us one measuring look and went down again without asking whether we wanted tea. She had, in that fifth week of the affair, come to a private accommodation with its irregularities; she had ceased to ask questions about the letters, and addressed herself instead, I noticed, to the care of Holmes, whom she had evidently decided to feed more regularly than he was in the habit of being fed.
We sat opposite one another at the fire. For some time, neither of us said anything. Then my friend set down his pipe upon the hearth, and laid his head back against the cushion, and closed his eyes, and said:
"Watson, I owe you a confession. I have owed it you for some time. It is an uncomfortable one for me, because it is not a confession of fact — of facts, as you very well know, I conceal them from you pretty systematically — but a confession of feeling. I am not accustomed to confessing feelings. I shall do it badly. You will oblige me, I hope, by not asking me to do it a second time."
"Holmes, if it distresses you, there is no need —"
"It