We had all been warned to appear before the magistrates upon the Thursday; but when the Thursday came there was no occasion for our testimony. A higher Judge had taken the matter in hand, and Jefferson Hope had been summoned before a tribunal where strict justice would be meted out to him. On the very night after his capture the aneurism burst, and he was found in the morning stretched upon the floor of the cell, with a placid smile upon his face, as though he had been able in his dying moments to look back upon a useful life, and on work well done.

“Gregson and Lestrade will be wild about his death,” Holmes remarked, as we chatted it over next evening. “Where will their grand advertisement be now?”

“I don’t see that they had very much to do with his capture,” I answered.

“What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence,” returned my companion, bitterly. “The question is, what can you make people believe that you have done? Never mind,” he continued, more brightly, after a pause. “I would not have missed the investigation for anything. There has been no better case within my recollection. Simple as it it was, there were several most instructive points about it.”

“Simple!” I ejaculated.

“Well, really, it can hardly be described as otherwise,” said Sherlock Holmes, smiling at my surprise. “The proof of its intrinsic simplicity is, that without any help save a few very ordinary deductions I was able to lay my hand upon the criminal within three days.”

“That is true,” said I.

“I have already explained to you that what is out of the common is usually a guide rather than a hindrance. In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backward. That is a very useful accomplishment, and a very easy one, but people do not practise it much. In the everyday affairs of life it is more useful to reason forward, and so the other comes to be neglected. There are fifty who can reason synthetically for one who can reason analytically.”

“I confess,” said I, “that I do not quite follow you.”

“I hardly expected that you would. Let me see if I can make it clearer. Most people, if you describe a train of events to them will tell you what the result would be. They can put those events together in their minds, and argue from them that something will come to pass. There are few people, however, who, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that result. This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning backward, or analytically. ”

“I understand,” said I.

“Now this was a case in which you were given the result and had to find everything else for yourself. Now let me endeavour to show you the different steps in my reasoning. To begin at the beginning. I approached the house, as you know, on foot, and with my mind entirely free from all impressions. I naturally began by examining the roadway, and there, as I have already explained to you, I saw clearly the marks of a cab, which, I ascertained by inquiry, must have been there during the night. I satisfied myself that it was a cab and not a private carriage by the narrow gauge of the wheels. The ordinary London growler is considerably less wide than a gentleman’s brougham.

‘God, what it is to be a man!’ she cried.

‘What?’ exclaimed Ursula in surprise.

‘The freedom, the liberty, the mobility!’ cried Gudrun, strangely flushed and brilliant. ‘You’re a man, you want to do a thing, you do it. You haven’t the THOUSAND obstacles a woman has in front of her.’

Ursula wondered what was in Gudrun’s mind, to occasion this outburst. She could not understand.

‘What do you want to do?’ she asked.

‘Nothing,’ cried Gudrun, in swift refutation. ‘But supposing I did. Supposing I want to swim up that water. It is impossible, it is one of the impossibilities of life, for me to take my clothes off now and jump in. But isn’t it RIDICULOUS, doesn’t it simply prevent our living!’

She was so hot, so flushed, so furious, that Ursula was puzzled.

The two sisters went on, up the road. They were passing between the trees just below Shortlands. They looked up at the long, low house, dim and glamorous in the wet morning, its cedar trees slanting before the windows. Gudrun seemed to be studying it closely.

‘Don’t you think it’s attractive, Ursula?’ asked Gudrun.

‘Very,’ said Ursula. ‘Very peaceful and charming.’

‘It has form, too—it has a period.’

‘What period?’

‘Oh, eighteenth century, for certain; Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Austen, don’t you think?’

Ursula laughed.

‘Don’t you think so?’ repeated Gudrun.

‘Perhaps. But I don’t think the Criches fit the period. I know Gerald is putting in a private electric plant, for lighting the house, and is making all kinds of latest improvements.’

Gudrun shrugged her shoulders swiftly.

‘Of course,’ she said, ‘that’s quite inevitable.’

‘Quite,’ laughed Ursula. ‘He is several generations of youngness at one go. They hate him for it. He takes them all by the scruff of the neck, and fairly flings them along. He’ll have to die soon, when he’s made every possible improvement, and there will be nothing more to improve. He’s got GO, anyhow.’

‘Certainly, he’s got go,’ said Gudrun. ‘In fact I’ve never seen a man that showed signs of so much. The unfortunate thing is, where does his GO go to, what becomes of it?’

‘Oh I know,’ said Ursula. ‘It goes in applying the latest appliances!’

‘Exactly,’ said Gudrun.

‘You know he shot his brother?’ said Ursula.

‘Shot his brother?’ cried Gudrun, frowning as if in disapprobation.

‘Didn’t you know? Oh yes!—I thought you knew. He and his brother were playing together with a gun. He told his brother to look down the gun, and it was loaded, and blew the top of his head off. Isn’t it a horrible story?’

‘How fearful!’ cried Gudrun. ‘But it is long ago?’