I went my
way a good deal puzzled and horrified, too, by what I had seen; for I
had paid another visit to the 'General Gordon,' and had got together a
good deal of the common gossip of the place about the Blacks. I didn't
mention the fact that I had seen a woman's face in the window; but I
heard that Mrs. Black had been much admired for her beautiful golden
hair, and round what had struck me with such a nameless terror there
was a mist of flowing yellow hair, as it were an aureole of glory round
the visage of a satyr. The whole thing bothered me in an indescribable
manner; and when I got home I tried my best to think of the impression
I had received as an illusion, but it was no use. I knew very well I
had seen what I have tried to describe to you, and I was morally
certain that I had seen Mrs. Black. And then there was the gossip of
the place, the suspicion of foul play, which I knew to be false, and my
own conviction that there was some deadly mischief or other going on in
that bright red house at the corner of the Devon Road,--how to
construct a theory of a reasonable kind out of these two elements. In
short, I found myself in a world of mystery; I puzzled my head over it
and filled up my leisure moments by gathering together odd threads of
speculation, but I never moved a step toward any real solution, and as
the summer days went on the matter seemed to grown misty and
indistinct, shadowing some vague terror, like a nightmare of last
month. I suppose it would before long have faded into the background of
my brain--I should not have forgotten it, for such a thing could never
be forgotten--but one morning as I was looking over the paper my eye
was caught by a heading over some two dozen lines of small type. The
words I had seen were simply, 'The Harlesden Case,' and I knew what I
was going to read. Mrs. Black was dead. Black had called in another
medical man to certify as to cause of death, and something or other had
aroused the strange doctor's suspicions, and there had been an inquest
and _post-mortem_. And the result? That, I will confess, did astonish
me considerably; it was the triumph of the unexpected. The two doctors
who made the autopsy were obliged to confess that they could not
discover the faintest trace of any kind of foul play; their most
exquisite tests and reagents failed to detect the presence of poison in
the most infinitesimal quantity. Death, they found, had been caused by
a somewhat obscure and sci