I was shown into an exquisitely furnished drawing-room by an old and ill-favoured woman, who answered my knock at the door. She gave me the impression that she was a sullen, deceptive creature, and I was at a loss to understand how such a woman could have found service with my friends--the bright and happy friends of three years ago. When I handed her my card to convey to Mrs. Redcar she impertinently turned it over, and scrutinised it, and fixed her cold bleared grey eyes on me, so that I was induced to say peremptorily, ‘Will you be good enough to go to your mistress at once and announce my arrival?’ ‘I ain’t got no mistress,’ she growled. ‘I’ve got a master’; and with this cryptic utterance she left the room. I waited a quarter of an hour, then the door was abruptly opened, and there stood before me Mrs. Redcar, but not the bright, sweet, radiant little woman of old. A look of premature age was in her face. Her eyes were red with weeping, and had a frightened, hunted expression. I was so astounded that I stood for a moment like one dumbfounded; but as Mrs. Redcar seized my hand and shook it, she gasped in a nervous, spasmodic way: ‘Thank God, you have come! My last hope is in you.’ Then, completely overcome by emotion, she burst into hysterical sobbing, and covered her face with her handkerchief. My astonishment was still so great, the unexpected had so completely paralysed me for the moment, that I seemed incapable of action. But of course this spell quickly passed, and I regained my self-possession. ‘How is it I find this change?’ I asked. It was a natural question, and the first my brain shaped. ‘It’s the work of a malignant fiend,’ she sobbed. This answer only deepened the mystery, and I began to think that perhaps she was literally mad. Then suddenly, as if she divined my thoughts, she drew her handkerchief from her face, motioned me to be seated, and literally flung herself on to a couch. ‘It’s an awful story,’ she said, in a hoarse, hollow voice, ‘and I look to you, and appeal to you, and pray to you to help me.’ ‘You can rely upon my doing anything that lies in my power,’ I answered. ‘But tell me your trouble. How is Jack? Where is he?’