But I have heard, Mr.Holmes, that you can see deeply into the manifold wickedness of the human heart.

You may advise me how to walk amid the dangers which encompass me." "I am all attention, madam." "My name is Helen Stoner, and I am living with my stepfather, who is the last survivor of one of the oldest Saxon families in England, the Roylotts of Stoke Moran, on the western border of Surrey." Holmes nodded his head.

"The name is familiar to me," said he.
"The family was at one time among the richest in England, and the estates extended over the borders into Berkshire in the north, and Hampshire in the west.

In the last century, however, four successive heirs were of a dissolute and wasteful disposition, and the family ruin was eventually completed by a gambler in the days of the Regency.

Nothing was left save a few acres of ground, and the two-hundred-year-old house, which is itself crushed under a heavy mortgage.