"Doyle, Arthur Conan - Disappearance Of Lady Frances Carfax" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doyle Arthur Conan)

"You say that you have had it because you need a change. Let me
suggest that you take one. How would Lausanne do, my dear
Watson--first-class tickets and all expenses paid on a princely
scale?"

"Splendid! But why?"

Holmes leaned back in his armchair and took his notebook from his
pocket.

"One of the most dangerous classes in the world," said he, "is
the drifting and friendless woman. She is the most harmless and
often the most useful of mortals, but she is the inevitable
inciter of crime in others. She is helpless. She is migratory.
She has sufficient means to take her from country to country and
from hotel to hotel. She is lost, as often as not, in a maze of
obscure pensions and boardinghouses. She is a stray chicken in a
world of foxes. When she is gobbled up she is hardly missed. I
much fear that some evil has come to the Lady Frances Carfax."

I was relieved at this sudden descent from the general to the
particular. Holmes consulted his notes.

"Lady Frances," he continued, "is the sole survivor of the direct
family of the late Earl of Rufton. The estates went, as you may
remember, in the male line. She was left with limited means, but
with some very remarkable old Spanish jewellery of silver and
curiously cut diamonds to which she was fondly attached--too
attached, for she refused to leave them with her banker and
always carried them about with her. A rather pathetic figure,
the Lady Frances, a beautiful woman, still in fresh middle age,
and yet, by a strange change, the last derelict of what only
twenty years ago was a goodly fleet."

"What has happened to her, then?"

"Ah, what has happened to the Lady Frances? Is she alive or
dead? There is our problem. She is a lady of precise habits,
and for four years it has been her invariable custom to write
every second week to Miss Dobney, her old governess, who has long
retired and lives in Camberwell. It is this Miss Dobney who has
consulted me. Nearly five weeks have passed without a word. The
last letter was from the Hotel National at Lausanne. Lady Frances
seems to have left there and given no address. The family are
anxious, and as they are exceedingly wealthy no sum will be
spared if we can clear the matter up."

"Is Miss Dobney the only source of information? Surely she had
other correspondents?"