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Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own

high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong

emotion in a nature such as his. And yet there was but one woman

to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and

questionable memory.

I had seen little of Holmes lately. My marriage had drifted us

away from each other. My own complete happiness, and the

home-centred interests which rise up around the man who first

finds himself master of his own establishment, were sufficient to

absorb all my attention, while Holmes, who loathed every form of

society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in

Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from

week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the

drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature. He was still,

as ever, deeply attracted by the study of crime, and occupied his

immense faculties and extraordinary powers of observation in

following out those clues, and clearing up those mysteries which

had been abandoned as hopeless by the official police.