Picture Dictionary & Books : Free for English Learner!

She had heard nothing in the night.

Her employers had all been in excellent spirits lately, and she had never known them more cheerful and prosperous.

She had fainted with horror upon entering the room in the morning and seeing that dreadful company round the table.

She had, when she recovered, thrown open the window to let the morning air in, and had run down to the lane, whence she sent a farm-lad for the doctor.

The lady was on her bed upstairs if we cared to see her.

It took four strong men to get the brothers into the asylum carriage.

She would not herself stay in the house another day and was starting that very afternoon to rejoin her family at St. Ives.

We ascended the stairs and viewed the body.

Miss Brenda Tregennis had been a very beautiful girl, though now verging upon middle age.

Her dark, clear-cut face was handsome, even in death, but there still lingered upon it something of that convulsion of horror which had been her last human emotion.

From her bedroom we descended to the sitting-room, where this strange tragedy had actually occurred.

The charred ashes of the overnight fire lay in the grate.

On the table were the four guttered and burned-out candles, with the cards scattered over its surface.

The chairs had been moved back against the walls, but all else was as it had been the night before.

Holmes paced with light, swift steps about the room; he sat in the various chairs, drawing them up and reconstructing their positions.

He tested how much of the garden was visible; he examined the floor, the ceiling, and the fireplace; but never once did I see that sudden brightening of his eyes and tightening of his lips which would have told me that he saw some gleam of light in this utter darkness.

"Why a fire?" he asked once. "Had they always a fire in this small room on a spring evening?"

Mortimer Tregennis explained that the night was cold and damp. For that reason, after his arrival, the fire was lit. "What are you going to do now, Mr. Holmes?" he asked.

My friend smiled and laid his hand upon my arm.

"I think, Watson, that I shall resume that course of tobacco-poisoning which you have so often and so justly condemned," said he.

"With your permission, gentlemen, we will now return to our cottage, for I am not aware that any new factor is likely to come to our notice here.

I will turn the facts over in my mind, Mr, Tregennis, and should anything occur to me I will certainly communicate with you and the vicar.

In the meantime I wish you both good-morning."

It was not until long after we were back in Poldhu Cottage that Holmes broke his complete and absorbed silence.

He sat coiled in his armchair, his haggard and ascetic face hardly visible amid the blue swirl of his tobacco smoke, his black brows drawn down, his forehead contracted, his eyes vacant and far away.

Table of Contents