The Hound of the Baskervilles Part 22 (2/2)
”Mrs Lyons,” said I as I rose fro a very great responsibility and putting yourself in a very false position by notan absolutely clean breast of all that you know If I have to call in the aid of the police you will find how seriously you are compromised If your position is innocent, why did you in the first instance deny having written to Sir Charles upon that date?”
”Because I feared that soht find myself involved in a scandal”
”And ere you so pressing that Sir Charles should destroy your letter?”
”If you have read the letter you will know”
”I did not say that I had read all the letter”
”You quoted some of it”
”I quoted the postscript The letter had, as I said, been burned and it was not all legible I ask you once again why it was that you were so pressing that Sir Charles should destroy this letter which he received on the day of his death”
”The matter is a very private one”
”The ation”
”I will tell you, then If you have heard anything of e and had reason to regret it”
”I have heard so much”
”My life has been one incessant persecution from a husband whom I abhor
The law is upon his side, and every day I am faced by the possibility that he may force me to live with him At the time that I wrote this letter to Sir Charles I had learned that there was a prospect ofmy freedo toI knew Sir Charles's generosity, and I thought that if he heard the story from my own lips he would help o?”
”Because I received help in the interval from another source”
”Why then, did you not write to Sir Charles and explain this?”
”So I should have done had I not seen his death in the paper next ether, and all my questions were unable to shake it I could only check it by finding if she had, indeed, instituted divorce proceedings against her husband at or about the tiedy
It was unlikely that she would dare to say that she had not been to Baskerville Hall if she really had been, for a trap would be necessary to take her there, and could not have returned to Coo Such an excursion could not be kept secret The probability was, therefore, that she was telling the truth, or, at least, a part of the truth I caain I had reached that dead hich seeet at the object of ht of the lady's face and of herheld back froht against every admission until it was forced from her? Why should she have been so reticent at the tiedy?
Surely the explanation of all this could not be as innocent as she would have me believe For the moment I could proceed no farther in that direction, but ht for a the stone huts upon the ue direction I realized it as I drove back and noted how hill after hill showed traces of the ancient people
Barryer lived in one of these abandoned huts, and th and breadth of the uide since it had shownupon the summit of the Black Tor That, then, should be the centre of my search Frohted upon the right one If this man were inside it I should find out from his own lips, at the point of ed us so long He ent Street, but it would puzzle him to do so upon the lonely moor On the other hand, if I should find the hut and its tenant should not be within it I il, until he returned Holmes had missed him in London It would indeed be a triumph for me if I could run hiainst us again and again in this inquiry, but now at last it caood fortune was none other than Mr Frankland, as standing, gray-whiskered and red-faced, outside the gate of his garden, which opened on to the highroad along which I travelled
”Good-day, Dr Watson,” cried he with unwonted good huive your horses a rest and coratulate me”