No, no; horrible! You'll convey all that is in your mind."

I left him full of the image of this magnificent intellect
babbling like a foolish child. He had handed me the key, and
with a happy thought I took it with me lest he should lock
himself in. Mrs. Hudson was waiting, trembling and weeping, in
the passage. Behind me as I passed from the flat I heard
Holmes's high, thin voice in some delirious chant. Below, as I
stood whistling for a cab, a man came on me through the fog.

"How is Mr. Holmes, sir?" he asked.

It was an old acquaintance, Inspector Morton, of Scotland Yard,
dressed in unofficial tweeds.

"He is very ill," I answered.

He looked at me in a most singular fashion. Had it not been too
fiendish, I could have imagined that the gleam of the fanlight
showed exultation in his face.

"I heard some rumour of it," said he.

The cab had driven up, and I left him.

Lower Burke Street proved to be a line of fine houses lying in
the vague borderland between Notting Hill and Kensington. The
particular one at which my cabman pulled up had an air of smug
and demure respectability in its old-fashioned iron railings, its
massive folding-door, and its shining brasswork. All was in