I had written to Ira, while still in Italy, a full account of the discovery, with all its tragic incidents and consequences. Afterwards, arriving in London, I filled in the sheet with a brief account of our subsequent doings and present intentions, and posted it to her where she was staying with the family at Claridge’s Hotel. It was misery to be so near and apart; but the peremptoriness of my mission admitted of no delay; while the nature of our relations precluded any present thought of a meeting under the Skene ægis. But how desolate seemed the country, void of the consciousness of that young darling presence in it. I could almost welcome the dripping skies, the sodden fields, the deathly soak and stillness, as things attuned to a mood abandoned of love and shivering under a sort of creeping paralysis of terror. For how could I forget for a moment the relations in which I stood towards the unhappy woman of whom it was the very purpose of our visit to make a traitor and informer? She had borne children to him. I was not the only fruit of her motherhood. I could not but feel my part somehow an execrable one; and most in its self-consciousness of a still-existing repugnance towards the object of our schemes, which was surely unnatural, but which I could not, for all my striving, overcome. Was not this, indeed, one of the bitterest features of a bitter tragedy? At the present moment, even, my thoughts, for all the filial warmth and graciousness they could command, turned instinctively to Lady Skene. The foreboding solemnity of my mood seemed to impart itself to my companions. We plashed and plodded along the field paths with hardly a word to exchange amongst us. Inspector Jannaway, it is true, had his own reasons for reserve. Holding the very tangible fact of a warrant for Mr Dalston’s arrest in his pocket, he seemed bent on leaving it to his Italian colleague to justify its production. “Let him have his head, gentlemen. He knows all about it. He’s agoing to prove the superiority of his system over ours. Very well; I’m not the man to interfere--not just yet awhile, anyway.” He did not speak these words, but his attitude unmistakably expressed them. He was a great English detective on the high horse, aggrieved by insolent comparisons. Let Valombroso have our confidence; let all fools have their paradise. We should find ourselves on the wrong side of ours in due time. When we wanted him--and we should want him--he was here at our service. In the meantime, he kept his thoughts--and his theories, if he had any--to himself, and acquiesced passively and pleasantly in all that was suggested. But he offered no suggestions of his own.