But he said all this for himself. One calm evening, while still at Charleston, he chanced to find himself on a promontory facing towards Europe three thousand miles away. He wrote a poem there; a better, a little better than the last of his you read.

And there, amid the iambic slog-and-smog and rhetorical question marks, and the really not too bad “vast calm indigoes,” let us leave Charles for a paragraph.

It was nearly three months after Mary had told her news—the very end of April. But in that interval Fortune had put Sam further in her debt by giving him the male second edition he so much wanted. It was a Sunday, an evening full of green-gold buds and church bells, with little chinkings and clatterings downstairs that showed his newly risen young wife and her help were preparing his supper; and with one child struggling to stand at the knees on which the three-weeks-old brother lay, dark little screwed-up eyes that already delighted Sam (“Sharp as razors, the little monkey”), it happened: something in those eyes did cut Sam’s not absolutely Bostonian soul.

Two days later Charles, by then peregrinated to New Orleans, came from a promenade in the Vieux Carre into his hotel. The clerk handed him a cable.

It said:

Charles read the words and turned away. After so long, so much between… he stared without seeing out into the busy street. From nowhere, no emotional correlative, he felt his eyes smart with tears. He moved outside, onto the porch of the hotel, and there lit himself a stogie. A minute or two later he returned to the desk.

“The next ship to Europe—can you tell me when she sails?”

He dismissed the cab at the bridge. It was the very last day of May, warm, affluent, the fronts of houses embowered in trees, the sky half blue, half fleeced with white clouds. The shadow of one fell for a minute across Chelsea, though the warehouses across the river still stood in sunlight.

Montague had known nothing. The information had come through the post; a sheet of paper containing nothing beyond the name and address. Standing by the solicitor’s desk, Charles recalled the previous address he had received from Sarah; but this was in a stiff copperplate. Only in the brevity could he see her.

Montague had, at Charles’s cabled command, acted with great care. No approach was to be made to her, no alarm—no opportunity for further flight—given. A clerk played detective, with the same description given to the real detectives in his pocket. He reported that a young lady conforming to the particulars was indeed apparently residing at the address; that the person in question went under the name of Mrs. Roughwood. The ingenuous transposition of syllables removed any lingering doubt as to the accuracy of the information; and removed, after the first momentary shock, the implications of the married tide. Such stratagems were quite common with single women in London; and proved the opposite of what was implied. Sarah had not married.

“I see it was posted in London. You have no idea…”

“It was sent here, so plainly it comes from someone who knows of our advertisements. It was addressed personally to you, so the someone knows whom we were acting for, yet appears uninterested in the reward we offered. That seems to suggest the young lady herself.”

“But why should she delay so long to reveal herself? And besides, this is not her hand.” Montague silently confessed himself at a loss. “Your clerk obtained no further information?”

“He followed instructions, Charles. I forbade him to make inquiries. By chance he was within hearing in the street when a neighbor wished her good morning. That is how we have the name.”

“And the house?”

“A respectable family residence. They are his very words.”

“She is presumably governess there.”

“That seems very likely.”

Charles had turned then to the window, which was just as well; for the way Montague had looked at his back suggested a certain lack of frankness. He had forbidden the clerk to ask questions; but he had not forbidden himself to question the clerk.

“You intend to see her?”

“My dear Harry, I have not crossed the Atlantic…” Charles smiled in apology for his exasperated tone. “I know what you would ask. I can’t answer. Forgive me, this matter is too personal. And the truth is, I don’t know what I feel. I think I shall not know till I see her again. All I do know is that… she continues to haunt me. That I must speak to her, I must. .. you understand.”

“You must question the Sphinx.”

“If you care to put it so.”

“As long as you bear in mind what happened to those who failed to solve the enigma.”

Charles made a rueful grimace. “If silence or death is the alternative—then you had better prepare the funeral oration.”

“I somehow suspect that that will not be needed.”

They had smiled.

But he was not smiling now, as he approached the Sphinx’s house. He knew nothing of the area; he had a notion that it was a kind of inferior substitute for Greenwich—a place where retired naval officers finished their days. The Victorian Thames was a far fouler river than today’s, every one of its tides hideously awash with sewage. On one occasion the stench was so insupportable that it drove the House of Lords out of their chamber; the cholera was blamed on it; and a riverside house was far from having the social cachet it has in our own deodorized century. For all that, Charles could see that the houses were quite handsome; perverse though their inhabitants must be in their choice of environment, they were plainly not driven there by poverty.

At last, and with an inner trembling, a sense of pallor, a sense too of indignity—his new American self had been swept away before the massive, ingrained past and he was embarrassedly conscious of being a gentleman about to call on a superior form of servant—he came to the fatal gate. It was of wrought iron, and opened onto a path that led briefly to a tall house of brick—though most of that was hidden to the roof by a luxuriant blanket of wisteria, just now beginning to open its first pale-blue pendants of bloom.