This book is designed to create a bleak,desolate tone (a la Wuthering Heights), and it does so by describing the heroine's graduallyincreasing suffering and oppression. The novel, like so many of Arthur Conan Doyle's SherlockHomes stories, exposes the vices that can flourish in the lonely, isolated British manor. The hero'ssufferings come as a blast of fresh air and relief in the novel: Orlando goes to fight on the Britishside in the American revolution and ends up wounded with several Indians in a rather inaccuratelydescribed American landscape. There is a sort of sequel, The Wanderings of Warwick, which tells what happens to two of the characters who disappear for a huge portion of the novel. The heroine is rather pathetic for a good deal of the novel, but she gets a burst of feminist courage at the end of the novel as she sets out on her own and finds a job.