It was impossible for me to listen any longer without reminding him of the other task before us. “Have you made any plans yet for the recovery of the letters?” I asked anxiously. “Ah!” He gave me a shrewd look. “You are quite right to interest yourself in that business, my boy. It is more important to protect Lady Violet than even to detect Weathered’s murderer. The living come before the dead, eh? I am inclined to trust that part of the work to you.” I suppose I must have shown some dismay. My kindly chief proceeded to explain himself. “We must begin with the assumption that everything that Weathered left behind him, including his correspondence, has become the property of his widow. If he kept these letters in his house they must be now in her possession, unless her daughter has annexed them. I think you should go round to Warwick Street to-morrow morning, and ask to see Mrs. Weathered.” I thought of the rather commonplace widow, who had appeared to be completely dominated by her daughter, and I did not hope much from the interview. “I doubt if she will part with them without Miss Neobard’s consent,” I said with hesitation. “Even if she has them.” “Try,” the physician urged. “I should not be surprised if that woman, quiet as she looked, was deeper in her husband’s secrets than Sarah Neobard was, in spite of her jealousy. Still waters run deep, remember. See her alone, if you can, and put the matter to her as a woman and a mother. Ask her how she would feel if her own daughter had been enticed to writing very confidential letters to a doctor, and those letters were now in a stranger’s hands. I fancy you will get something out of Mrs. Weathered.” “And if I fail?” Tarleton compressed his lips rather grimly. “In that case, one of us may have to show her that her own daughter is not yet out of the wood. We have both heard a confession from Sarah Neobard, and it was not made under any pledge of secrecy.” There the matter rested that night. The next day soon after breakfast my chief set off to make inquiries at the publishers of _Across Sumatra_, and I started on my difficult errand to Warwick Street. Only my knowledge of the desperate position in which Violet had placed herself could have nerved me to the task in front of me. It was painful enough to have to plead for mercy from a stranger; the prospect of having to threaten the mother with her daughter’s prosecution for a crime of which I did not believe her guilty was so repugnant to me that I made up my mind beforehand not to act on Tarleton’s hint. My confidence in his sense of justice was very strong, but I felt that I was too much in the dark myself to accept such a responsibility. The blinds of the house were down, a circumstance which I attributed to the presence of a corpse inside. But there was a long delay in answering my ring, and when the youthful butler opened the door to me his untidy dress and rough hair suggested that he did not consider himself on duty.