patient can be no worse than he is.鈥?
鈥淲hat is the matter?鈥?
Holmes took a rather soiled card from the table. 鈥淛osiah Amberley. He says he was junior partner of Brickfall and Amberley, who are manufacturers of artistic materials. You will see their names upon paint-boxes. He made his little pile, retired from business at the age of sixty-one, bought a house at Lewisham, and settled down to rest after a life of ceaseless grind. One would think his future was tolerably assured.鈥?
鈥淵es, indeed.鈥?
Holmes glanced over some notes which he had scribbled upon the back of an envelope.
鈥淩etired in 1896, Watson. Early in 1897 he married a woman twenty years younger than himself 鈥?a good-looking woman, too, if the photograph does not flatter. A competence, a wife, leisure 鈥?it seemed a straight road which lay before him. And yet within two years he is, as you have seen, as broken and miserable a creature as crawls beneath the sun.鈥?
鈥淏ut what has happened?鈥?
鈥淭he old story, Watson. A treacherous friend and a fickle wife. It would appear that Amberley has one hobby in life, and it is chess. Not far from him at Lewisham there lives a young doctor who is also a chess-player. I have noted his name as Dr. Ray Ernest. Ernest was frequently in the house, and an intimacy between him and Mrs. Amberley was a natural sequence, for you must admit that our unfortunate client has few outward graces, whatever his inner virtues may be. The couple went off together last week 鈥?destination untraced. What is more, the faithless spouse carried off the old man鈥檚 deed-box as her personal luggage with a good
