With him is the bizarre stranger, who turns out to be Henry Wood, a former British soldier who recounts how he might have married Nancy Barclay years before in India, had not the then Sergeant Barclay sent him off on a near-fatal mission so as to marry the lady himself. 

… Simpson (Jim Welch), leader of the Baker Street Irregulars, arrives. 

The Colonel had died of shock when Wood presented himself after all these years, and Holmes tells him to go in peace.