Holmes is visited by Mrs Merrilow, a landlady from South Brixton who has an unusual lodger who never shows her face.

It was a most tragic case in which a circus lion somehow got loose and savaged two people, one of whom was killed, and the other badly disfigured.

Upon arriving at Brixton, Holmes and Watson are shown into Mrs Ronder's room, which she seldom leaves.

She tells Holmes and Watson that Mr Ronder was a terrible husband, cruel and violent in the extreme, even to the circus animals, but he didn't care, even though he wound up in the dock for it several times.

As part of the plan, Leonardo made a club with five nails in it, which could deliver wounds that might be mistaken for those of a lion's paw.

Mrs Ronder could not bring herself to implicate Leonardo in her husband's murder at the inquest, and is only now telling Holmes and Watson this story because she believes that she will soon die.

Holmes can only offer advice in this situation; realising that Mrs Ronder is contemplating suicide, he reminds her that her life is worth something as an example of patient suffering in an impatient world.

[2] It was included in the short story collection The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes,[2] which was published in the UK and the US in June 1927.

[3] In 1932, the story was adapted by Edith Meiser as part of the American radio series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

[4] Another dramatisation of the story adapted by Meiser aired on the same series on 31 March 1935 (with Louis Hector as Holmes and Lovell as Watson).