"But she can speak." Dr. Stanley stepped eagerly up to the bedside to capture one of those long white hands for himself. "Madam. What is your name?"

It seemed to me she gave a tiny shake of her head, but she did not look up. Dr. Stanley gazed at her hopefully for a moment, then drew back with a sigh and a shrug. Holmes in the meanwhile completed a brief examination of the lady's feet.

"The marks here also date from the night before last; none older. She has been accustomed to wearing well-fitting shoes. She has been quite athletic at one time but has led of late a more sedentary, indoor life. This burn scar upon her leg is many years old; it dates from the same period as that scar on her left arm, which, by the way, is undoubtedly a bullet wound."

"But what does it all add up to?" asked Lestrade, more puzzled by this flow of information by the minute.

"Well, both your frenzied housewife and your remorseful castaway vanish, I'm afraid. We are left," he went on more slowly, as if not yet absolutely sure of the points he was enumerating, "with a strong-minded, even somewhat eccentric spinster who has led a very active and unconventional youth, and who until a month ago made a decent living as either a chemist or a chemist's assistant."

The grey eyes of the woman were fixed on the detective with a flame-like intensity, but she retained her masked silence.

"You have solved it!" cried Dr. Stanley, who had been following Holmes's demonstration with close and amazed attention.

"Hardly," responded Holmes dryly, wholly unflattered. "I cannot yet begin to suggest how such a woman could have turned up in her condition on the Thames Embankment at two in the morning. There is something very unlikely..."

I could see something was puzzling my friend very much. He stood with his chin upon his hand a moment without completing his last thought, then returned to the head of the bed. He gently lifted the mass of tawny hair to look at the back of the lady's neck, then began to examine her scalp.