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I see them on this occasion fastened with an elaborate double bow, which is not your usual method of tying them.

You have, therefore, had them off.

Who has tied them? A bootmaker-or the boy at the bath.

It is unlikely that it is the bootmaker, since your boots are nearly new.

Well, what remains? The bath.

Absurd, is it not? But, for all that, the Turkish bath has served a purpose."

"What is that?"

"You say that you have had it because you need a change. Let me suggest that you take one. How would Lausanne do, my dear Watson-first-class tickets and all expenses paid on a princely scale?"

"Splendid! But why?"

Holmes leaned back in his armchair and took his notebook from his pocket.

"One of the most dangerous classes in the world," said he, "is the drifting and friendless woman.

She is the most harmless and often the most useful of mortals, but she is the inevitable inciter of crime in others.

She is helpless.

She is migratory.

She has sufficient means to take her from country to country and from hotel to hotel.

She is lost, as often as not, in a maze of obscure pensions and boardinghouses.

She is a stray chicken in a world of foxes.

When she is gobbled up she is hardly missed.

I much fear that some evil has come to the Lady Frances Carfax."

I was relieved at this sudden descent from the general to the particular. Holmes consulted his notes.

"Lady Frances," he continued, "is the sole survivor of the direct family of the late Earl of Rufton.

The estates went, as you may remember, in the male line.

She was left with limited means, but with some very remarkable old Spanish jewellery of silver and curiously cut diamonds to which she was fondly attached-too attached, for she refused to leave them with her banker and always carried them about with her.

A rather pathetic figure, the Lady Frances, a beautiful woman, still in fresh middle age, and yet, by a strange change, the last derelict of what only twenty years ago was a goodly fleet."

"What has happened to her, then?"

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