The Correspondence Continues
What passed at the Telegraph Exchange on the Thursday night I have set down elsewhere, in a private record which I do not propose, in the present state of certain surviving persons, to publish. I shall say here only that a man whose name I still do not write was taken up, quietly, by officers of a department that does not bear a name in the Gazette; that two other men, who had been with him, were taken up with him; that no shot was fired, no alarm raised, and no woman present was seen by any other than my friend and myself. By half past eleven the office in St. Martin's-le-Grand had resumed its customary rustling quiet. Mrs. Lyle had completed her shift, signed her register, and gone home to Paultons Square as usual. Holmes and I had walked back to Baker Street through Holborn, and had drunk a whisky apiece without speaking, and had gone to our beds.
On the Friday I rose late. Holmes was out. He returned in the middle of the afternoon and told me, without any particular emphasis, that Mrs. Lyle had given her notice at the Exchange that morning, that her rooms in Paultons Square had been shut up by tea-time, and that the maid had been sent by the five o'clock train to her people in Somerset with a quarter's wages and a good reference. Of Mrs. Lyle herself there was no trace. Holmes had watched the afternoon boat-train go out from Victoria. He had watched, later, a slow stopping