Red Széll

She is migratory.

She has sufficient means to take her from country to country and from hotel to hotel.

She is lost as often as not in a maze of obscure pensions and boarding houses.

She is a stray chicken in a world of foxes.

When she is gobbled up, she is hardly missed.

I much fear that some evil has come to the Lady Frances Carfax.

I was relieved at this sudden descent from the general to the particular.

Holmes consulted his notes.

Lady Frances, he continued, is the sole survivor of the direct family of the late Earl of Rufton.

The estates went, as you may remember, in the male line.

She was left with limited means, but with some very remarkable old Spanish jewellery of silver and curiously cut diamonds to which she was fondly attached.

Too attached, for she refused to leave them with her banker and always carried them about with her.

A rather pathetic figure, the Lady Frances, a beautiful woman still in fresh middle age, and yet, by a strange change, the last derelict of what only 20 years ago was a goodly fleet.

What has happened to her then?

Ah, what has happened to the Lady Frances?

Is she alive or dead?

There is our problem.

She is a lady of precise habits, and for four years it has been her invariable custom to write every second week to Miss Dobney, her old governess, who has long retired and lives in Camberwell.

It is this Miss Dobney who has consulted me.

Nearly five weeks have passed without a word.