"An accomplice after the act, not before it. My theory is this: Dr. Steele met the lady after he came to town. How he managed to raise himself from the cheap general practitioner to a leading London physician, one doesn't know. It's like stepping from thirty shillings a week to being a star at fifty pounds; no one knows how it's done. Do you think Lady Woodroffe was useful in talking about him? If I wrote a story, I should make the doctor dog the lady's footsteps and coerce her into advancing him. But this isn't a story. However, I take it that he met her, recognized her, and that they agreed that nothing was to be said about this little transaction of the past. Then, of course, when Alice turned up unexpectedly, and asked where the child was to be seen, there was nothing to do except to hold up his hands and protest that he knew nothing about the child." "But all this is guess-work, Dick." "Yes. I am afraid we have nothing before us but guess-work. Unless we get some facts to go upon. Look here. A woman is standing on one side of a high wall; another woman is on the other side of the wall. There is a door in the wall; Sir Robert keeps the key of that door in his pocket. There is only one key, and he has it. Unless he consents to unlock the door, those two women can never meet. And so my half-brother will remain upon his eminence." They fell into a gloomy silence. Dick broke it. "Molly, what about our good friend, the mother of this interesting changeling?" "She is strangely comforted by the reflection that the matter is in your hands. Dick, you have found favour in her sight and in her husband's." "Good, so far." "And she is firmly persuaded that you will bring the truth to light. She still clings to her dream, you know." "Does she talk about Humphrey? Was she taken with him?" "She says little. She lies down and shuts her eyes. Then she is thinking of him. She likes me to play, so that she may think about him. When we drive out, I am sure she is looking for him in the crowd. If he were to call, she would tell him everything. And I am certain that she dreams of heaping upon him all that a young man can possibly desire as soon as she gets him back." "I hope the poor soul will not meet with disappointment. But I fear, Molly--I fear." He relapsed into his gloomy silence. "I hold the two ends of the chain in my hands, but I cannot connect the ends. I might go to Steele and show him what I suspect. He would only laugh at me. He laughs like the Sphynx, sometimes. If I went to Lady Woodroffe, I should be handed over to her solicitors, and by them conducted to the High Court of Justice; I should hear plain speaking from the Judge on the subject of defamation of character. Everybody would believe that I was a black-mailer. I should be called upon to pay large sums of money as damages; and I should have to go through the Court of Bankruptcy."