The climax of this story has to be (at least to us modern readers) one of Conan Doyle's most unintentionally hilarious scenes. It sounds like something that would be right at home in a Dudley Do-Right short.

"You're too late! She's my wife!"
"No, she's your widow."

Neat turn of phrase, but yeah, on the whole the scene's majorly corny. So is Violet's habit of referring to an unwelcome suitor as 'that odious man.'
(From the female POV it's also disappointing that the intelligent, resourceful heroine gets so badly stalled in damsel-in-distress mode.)

On the other hand...we have to remember that to Doyle's audience the ending would have been a guaranteed shocker. The notion of a virtuous young beauty tied to a tree and forced to surrender said virtue to a 'coarse' - and let us not forget odious - bad guy would have inspired real horror in the Victorian breast.

Been a while since I read this one, but I remember being very dissappoined. There were only two men in this story and you knew the "odious man" had to be one of them.