He spoke so earnestly that he filled me with vague alarm.

"Dr. Marten," I said solemnly, "answer me just one question. Do you know who was the murderer?"

"No, no!" he exclaimed, starting once more. "Thank heaven, I can't tell you that! I don't know. I know nothing. Nobody on earth knows but the two who were present on the night of the murder, I feel sure. And of those two, one's unknown, and the other has forgotten."

"But you suspect who he is?" I put in, probing the secret curiously.

He trembled visibly.

"I suspect who he is," he replied, after a moment's hesitation. "But I have never communicated, and will never communicate, my suspicions to anybody, not even to you. I will only say this: the person whom I suspect is one with whom you may now have forgotten all your past relations, but whom you would be sorry to punish if you recovered your memory. I formed a strong opinion at the time who that person was. I formed it from the nature and disposition of the wound, and the arrangement of the objects in the room when I was called in to see your father's body."

"And you never said so at the inquest!" I cried, indignant.

He looked at me hard again. Then he spoke in a very slow and earnest voice:

"For your sake, Una, and for the sake of your affections, I held my peace," he said. "My dear, the suspicion was but a very slender one: I had nothing to go upon. And why should I have tried to destroy your happiness?"

That horrible article in the penny Society paper came back to my mind once more with hideous suggestiveness. I turned to him almost fiercely.

"So far as you know, Dr. Marten," I asked, "was I ever in love? Had I ever an admirer? Was I ever engaged to anyone?"

He shrugged his shoulders and smiled a sort of smile of relief.

"How should I know?" he answered. "Admirers?—yes, dozens of them; I was one myself. Lovers?—who can say? But I advise you not to push the inquiry further."

I questioned him some minutes longer, but could get nothing more from him. Then I rose to go.

"Dr. Marten," I said firmly, "if I remember all, and if it wrings my heart to remember, I tell you I will give up that man to justice all the same! I think I know myself well enough to know this much at least, that I never, never could stoop either to love or to screen a man who could commit such a foul and dastardly crime as this one."

He took my hand fervently, raised it with warmth to his lips and kissed it twice over.

"My dear," he said, with tears dropping down his gentle old cheeks, "this is a very great mystery—a terrible mystery. But I know you speak the truth. I can see you mean it. Therefore, all the more earnestly do I beg and beseech you, go away from Woodbury at once, and as long as you live think no more about it."



CHAPTER VIII.

A VISION OF DEAD YEARS



The interview with Dr. Marten left me very much disquieted. But it wasn't the only disquieting thing that occurred at Woodbury. Before I left the place I happened to go one day into Jane's own little sitting-room. Jane was anxious I should see it—she wanted me to know all her house, she said, for the sake of old times: and for the sake of those old times that I couldn't remember, but when I knew she'd been kind to me, I went in and looked at it.

There was nothing very peculiar about Jane's little sitting-room: just the ordinary English landlady's parlour. You know the type:—square table in the middle; bright blue vases on the mantelpiece; chromo-lithograph from the Illustrated London News on the wall; rickety whatnot with glass-shaded wax-flowers in the recess by the window. But over in one corner I chanced to observe a framed photograph of early execution, which hung faded and dim there. Perhaps it was because my father was such a scientific amateur; but photography, I found out in time, struck the key-note of my history in every chapter. I didn't know why, but this particular picture attracted me strangely. It came from The Grange, Jane told me: she'd hunted it out in the attic over the front bedroom after the house was shut up. It belonged to a lot of my father's early attempts that were locked in a box there. "He'd always been trying experiments and things," she said, "with photography, poor gentleman."

Faded and dim as it was, the picture riveted my eyes at once by some unknown power of attraction. I gazed at it long and earnestly. It represented a house of colonial aspect, square, wood-built, and verandah-girt, standing alone among strange trees whose very names and aspects were then unfamiliar to me, but which I nowadays know to be Australian eucalyptuses. On the steps of the verandah sat a lady in deep mourning. A child played by her side, and a collie dog lay curled up still and sleepy in the foreground. The child, indeed, stirred no chord of any sort in my troubled brain; but my heart came up into my mouth so at sight of the lady, that I said to myself all at once in my awe, "That must surely be my mother!"

The longer I looked at it, the more was I convinced I must have judged aright. Not indeed that in any true sense I could say I remembered her face or figure: I was so young when she died, according to everybody's account, that even if I'd remained in my First State I could hardly have retained any vivid recollection of her. But both lady and house brought up in me once more to some vague degree that strange consciousness of familiarity I had noticed at The Grange: and what was odder still, the sense of wont seemed even more marked in the Australian cottage than in the case of the house which all probability would have inclined one beforehand to think I must have remembered better. If this was indeed my earliest home, then I seemed to recollect it far more readily than my later one.

I turned trembling to Jane, hardly daring to frame the question that rose first to my lips.

"Is that—my mother?" I faltered out slowly.

But there Jane couldn't help me. She'd never seen the lady, she said.

"When first I come to The Grange, miss, you see, your mother'd been buried a year; there was only you and Mr. Callingham in family. And I never saw that photograph, neither, till I picked it out of the box locked up in the attic. The little girl might be you, like enough, when you look at it sideways; and yet again it mightn't. But the lady I don't know. I never saw your mother."

So I was fain to content myself with pure conjecture.

All day long, however, the new picture haunted me almost as persistently as the old one.

That night I went to sleep fast, and slept for some hours heavily. I woke with a start. I had been dreaming very hard. And my dream was peculiarly clear and lifelike. Never since the first night of my new life—the night of the murder—had I dreamed such a dream, or seen dead objects so vividly. It came out in clear colours, like the terrible Picture that had haunted me so long. And it affected me strangely. It was a scene, rather than a dream—a scene, as at the theatre; but a scene in which I realised and recognised everything.

I stood on the steps of a house—a white wooden house, with a green-painted verandah—the very house I had seen that afternoon in the faded photograph in Jane's little sitting-room. But I didn't think of it at first as the house in the old picture: I thought of it as home—our own place—the cottage. The steps seemed to me very high, as in childish recollection. A lady walked about on the verandah and called to me: a lady in a white gown, like the lady in the photograph, only younger and prettier, and dressed much more daintily. But I didn't think of her as that either: I called her mamma to myself: I looked up into her face, oh, ever so much above me: I must have been very small indeed when that picture first occurred to me. There was a gentleman, too, in a white linen coat, who pinched my mamma's ear, and talked softly and musically. But I didn't think of him quite so: I knew he was my papa: I played about his knees, a little scampering child, and looked up in his face, and teased him and laughed at him. My papa looked down at me, and called me a little kitten, and rolled me over on my back, and fondled me and laughed with me. There were trees growing all about, big trees with long grey leaves: the same sort of trees as the ones in the photograph. But I didn't remember that at first: in my dream, and in the first few minutes of my waking thought, I knew them at once as the big blue-gum-trees.

I awoke in the midst of it: and the picture persisted.

Then, with a sudden burst of intuition, the truth flashed upon me all at once. My dream was no mere dream, but a revelation in my sleep. It was my intellect working unconsciously and spontaneously in an automatic condition. For the very first time in my life, since the night of the murder, I had really REMEMBERED something that occurred before it.

This was a scene of my First State. In all probability it was my earliest true childish recollection.

I sat up in bed, appalled. I dared not call aloud or ring for Jane to come to me. But if I'd seen a ghost, it could hardly have affected me more profoundly than this ghost of my own dead life thus brought suddenly back to me. Gazing away across some illimitable vista of dim years, I remembered this one scene as something that once occurred, long ago, to my very self, in my own experience. Then came a vast gulf, an unbridged abyss: and after that, with a vividness as of yesterday, the murder.

I held my ears and crouched low, sitting up in my bed in the dark. But the dream seemed to go on still: it remained with me distinctly.

The more I thought it over, the more certain it appeared as part of my own experience. Putting two and two together, I made sure in my own mind this was a genuine recollection of my life in Australia. I was born there, I knew: that I had learned from everybody. But I could distinctly remember having LIVED there now. It came back to me as memory. The dream had reinstated it.

And it was the sight of the photograph that had produced the dream. This was curious, very. A weird idea came across me. Had I begun, in all past efforts to remember, at the wrong end? Instead of trying to recollect the circumstances that immediately preceded the murder, ought I to have set out by trying to reinstate my First Life, chapter by chapter and verse by verse, from childhood upward? Ought I to start by recalling as far as possible my very earliest recollections in my previous existence, and then gradually work up through all my subsequent history to the date of the murder?

The more I thought of it, the more convinced was I that that was the right procedure.

It was certainly significant that this vague childish recollection of something which might have happened when I was just about two years old should be the very first thing to recur to my my memory. Yet so appalled and alarmed was I by the weirdness of this sudden apparition, looming up, as it were, all by itself in the depths of my consciousness, that I hardly dared bring myself to think of trying to recall any other scenes of that dead and past existence. The picture rose like an exhalation, hanging unrelated in mid-air, a mere mental mirage: and it terrified me so much, that I shrank unutterably from the effort of calling up another of like sort to follow it.



CHAPTER IX.

HATEFUL SUSPICIONS



The rest of that night I lay awake in my bed, the scene in the verandah by the big blue-gum-trees haunting me all the time, much as in earlier days the Picture of the murder had pursued and haunted me. Early in the morning I rose up, and went down to Jane in her little parlour. I longed for society in my awe. I needed human presence. I couldn't bear to be left alone by myself with all these pressing and encompassing mysteries.

"Jane," I said after a few minutes' careless talk—for I didn't like to tell her about my wonderful dream,—"where exactly did you find the picture of that house hanging over in the corner there?"

"Lor' bless your heart, miss," Jane answered, "there's a whole boxful of them at The Grange. Nobody ever cared for them. They're up in the top attic. They were locked till your papa died, and then they were opened by order of the executors. Some of 'em's faded even worse than that one, and none of 'em's very good; but I picked this one out because it was better worth framing for my room than most of 'em. The executors took no notice when they found what they was. They opened the box to see if it was dockyments."

"Well, Jane," I said, "I shall go up and bring them every one away with me. It's possible they may help me to recollect things a bit." I drew my hand across my forehead. "It all seems so hazy," I went on. "Yet when I see things again, I sometimes feel as if I almost recognised them."

So that very morning we went up together (I wouldn't go alone), and got the rest of the photographs—very faded positives from old-fashioned plates, most of them representing persons and places I had never seen; and a few of them apparently not taken in England.

I didn't look them all over at once just then. I thought it best not to do so. I would give my memory every possible chance. Take a few at a time, and see what effect they produced on me. Perhaps—though I shrank from the bare idea with horror—they might rouse in my sleep such another stray effort of spontaneous reconstruction. Yet the last one had cost me much nervous wear and tear—much mental agony.

A few days after, I went away from Woodbury. I had learned for the moment, I thought, all that Woodbury could teach me: and I longed to get free again for a while from this pervading atmosphere of mystery. At Aunt Emma's, at least, all was plain and aboveboard. I would go back to Barton-on-the-Sea, and rest there for a while, among the heathery hills, before proceeding any further on my voyage of discovery.

But I took back Jane with me. I was fond of Jane now. In those two short weeks I had learned to cling to her. Though I remembered her, strictly speaking, no more than at first, yet the affection I must have borne her in my First State seemed to revive in me very easily, like all other emotions. I was as much at home with Jane, indeed, as if I had known her for years. And this wasn't strange; for I HAD known her for years, in point of fact; and and though I'd forgotton most of those years, the sense of familiarity they had inspired still lived on with me unconsciously. I know now that memory resides chiefly in the brain, while the emotions are a wider endowment of the nervous system in general; so that while a great shock may obliterate whole tracts in the memory, no power on earth can ever alter altogether the sentiments and feelings.

As for Jane, she was only too glad to come with me. There were no lodgers at present, she said; and none expected. Her sister Elizabeth would take care of the rooms, and if any stranger came, why, Lizzie'd telegraph down at once for her. So I wrote to Aunt Emma to expect us both next day. Aunt Emma's, I knew, was a home where I or mine were always welcome.

Jane had never seen Aunt Emma. There had been feud between the families while my father lived, so she didn't visit The Grange after my mother's death. Aunt Emma had often explained to me in part how all that happened. It was the one point in our family history on which she'd ever been explicit: for she had a grievance there; and what woman on earth can ever suppress her grievances? It's our feminine way to air them before the world, as it's a man's to bury them deep in his own breast and brood over them.

My mother, she told me, had been a widow when my father married her—a rich young widow. She had gone away, a mere girl, to Australia with her first husband, a clergyman, who was lost at sea two or three years after, on the voyage home to England without her. She had one little girl by her first husband, but the child died quite young: and then she married my father, who met her first in Australia while she waited for news of the clergyman's safety. Her family always disapproved of the second marriage. My father had no money, it seemed; and mamma was well off, having means of her own to start with, like Aunt Emma, and having inherited also her first husband's property, which was very considerable. He had left it to his little girl, and after her to his wife; so that first my father, and then I myself, came in, in the end, to both the little estates, though my mother's had been settled on the children of the first marriage. Aunt Emma always thought my father had married for money: and she said he had been hard and unkind to mamma: not indeed cruel; he wasn't a cruel man; but severe and wilful. He made her do exactly as he wished about everything, in a masterful sort of way, that no woman could stand against. He crushed her spirit entirely, Aunt Emma told me; she had no will of her own, poor thing: his individuality was so strong, that it overrode my mother's weak nature rough-shod.

Not that he was rough. He never scolded her; he never illtreated her; but he said to her plainly, "You are to do so and so;" and she obeyed like a child. She never dared to question him.

So Aunt Emma had always said my mother was badly used, especially in money matters—the money being all, when one came to think of it, her own or her first husband's;—and as a consequence, auntie was never invited to The Grange during my father's lifetime.

When we reached Barton-on-the-Sea, Jane and I, on our way from Woodbury, Aunt Emma was waiting at the station to meet us. To my great disappointment, I could see at first sight she didn't care for Jane: and I could also see at first sight Jane didn't care for her. This was a serious blow to me, for I leaned upon those two more than I leaned upon anyone; and I had far too few friends in the world of my own, to afford to do without any one of them.

In the evening, however, when I went up to my own room to bed, Jane came up to help me as she always did at Woodbury. I began at once to tax her with not liking Aunt Emma. With a little hesitation, Jane admitted that at first sight she hadn't felt by any means disposed to care for her. I pressed her hard as to why. Jane held off and prevaricated. That roused my curiosity:—you see, I'm a woman. I insisted upon knowing.

"Oh, miss, I can't tell you!" Jane cried, growing red in the face, "I can't bear to say it out. You oughtn't to ask. It'll hurt you to know I even thought such a thing of her!"

"You MUST tell me, Jane," I exclaimed, with a cold shudder of terror, half guessing what she meant. "Don't keep me in suspense. Let me know what it is. I'm accustomed to shocks now. I know I can stand them."

Jane answered nothing directly. She only held out her coarse red hand and asked me, with a face growing pale as she spoke:

"Where's that picture of the murder?"

I produced it from my box, trembling inwardly all over.

Jane darted one finger demonstratively at a point in the photograph.

"Whose hand is THAT?" she asked with a strange earnestness, putting her nail on the murderer's.

The words escaped me in a cry of horror almost before I was aware of them:

"Aunt Emma's!" I said, gasping. "I NEVER noticed it before."

Then I drew back and stared at it in speechless awe and consternation.

It was quite, quite true. No use in denying it. The figure that escaped through the window was dressed in man's clothes, to be sure, and as far as one could judge from the foreshortening and the peculiar stoop, had a man's form and stature. But the hand was a woman's—soft, and white, and delicate: nay more, the hand, as I said in my haste, was line for line Aunt Emma's.

In a moment a terrible sinking came over me from head to foot. I trembled like an aspen-leaf. Could this, then, be the meaning of Dr. Marten's warning, that I should let sleeping dogs lie, lest I should be compelled to punish someone whom I loved most dearly? Had Fate been so cruel to me, that I had learned to cling most in my Second State to the very criminal whose act had blotted out my First? Had I grown to treat like a mother my father's murderer?

Aunt Emma's hand! Aunt Emma's hand! That was Aunt Emma's hand, every touch and every line of it. But no! where were the marks, those well-known marks on the palm? I took up the big magnifying-glass with which I had often scanned that photograph close before. Not a sign or a trace of them. I shut my eyes, and called up again the mental Picture of the murder. I looked hard at the phantom-hand in it, that floated like a vision, all distinct before my mind's eye. It was flat and smooth and white. Not a scar—not a sign on it. I turned round to Jane, that too natural detective.

"No, no!" I cried hastily, with a quick tone of triumph. "Aunt Emma's hand is marked on the palm with great gashes and cuts. This one's smooth as smooth can be. And so's the one I can see in the Picture within me!"

Jane drew back with a startled air, and opened her mouth, all agog, to let in a deep breath.

"The wall!" she said slowly. "The bottle-glass, don't you know! The blood on the top! Whoever did it, climbed over and tore his hands. Or HER hands, if it was a woman! That would account for the gashes."

This was more than I could endure. The coincidence was too crushing. I bent down my head on my arms and cried silently, bitterly. I hated Jane in my heart for even suggesting it. Yet I couldn't deny to myself for a moment the strength and suggestiveness of her half-spoken argument.

Not that for a second I believed it true. I could never believe it. Aunt Emma, so gentle, so kindly, so sweet: incapable of hurting any living thing: the tenderest old lady that breathed upon earth: and my own mother's sister, whom I loved as I never before loved anyone! Aunt Emma the murderess! The bare idea was preposterous! I couldn't entertain it. My whole nature revolted from it.

And indeed, how very slight, after all, was the mere scrap of evidence on which Jane ventured to suggest so terrible a charge! A man—in man's clothes—fairly tall and slim, and apparently dark- haired, but stooping so much that he looked almost hump-backed: how different from Aunt Emma, with her womanly figure, and her upright gait, and her sweet old white head! Why, it was clearly ridiculous.

And yet, the fact remained that as Jane pointed to the Picture and asked, "Whose hand is that?" the answer came up all spontaneously to my lips, without hesitation, "Aunt Emma's!"

I sat there long in my misery, thinking it over to myself. I didn't know what to do. I couldn't go and confide to Aunt Emma's ear this new and horrible doubt,—which was no doubt after all, for I KNEW it was impossible. I hated Jane for suggesting it; I hated her for telling me. Yet I couldn't be left alone. I was far too terrified.

"Oh, Jane;" I cried, looking up to her, and yet despising myself for saying it, "you must stop here to-night and sleep with me. If I'm left by myself in the room alone, I know I shall go mad—I can feel it—I'm sure of it!"

Jane stopped with me and soothed me. She was certainly very kind. Yet I felt in a dim underhand sort of way it was treason to Aunt Emma to receive her caresses at all after what she had said to me. Though to be sure, it was I, not she, who spoke those hateful words. It was I myself who had said the hand was Aunt Emma's.

As I lay awake and thought, the idea flashed across me suddenly, could Jane have any grudge of her own against Aunt Emma? Was this a deliberate plot? What did she mean by her warnings that I should keep my mind open? Why had she said from the very first it was a woman's hand? Did she want to set me against my aunt? And was Dr. Marten in league with her? In my tortured frame of mind, I felt all alone in the world. I covered my head and sobbed in my misery. I didn't know who were my friends and who were against me.

At last, after long watching, I dozed off into an uneasy sleep. Jane had already been snoring long beside me. I woke up again with a start. I was cold and shuddering. I had dreamed once more the same Australian dream. My mamma as before stood gentle beside me. She stooped down and smoothed my hair: I could see her face and her form distinctly. And I noticed now she was like her sister, Aunt Emma, only younger and prettier, and ever so much slighter. And her hand, too, was soft and white like auntie's—very gentle and delicate.

It was just there that I woke up—with the hand before my eyes. Oh, how vividly I noted it! Aunt Emma's hand, only younger, and unscarred on the palm. The family hand, no doubt: the hand of the Moores. I remembered, now, that Aunt Emma had spoken more than once of that family peculiarity. It ran through the house, she said. But my hand was quite different: not the Moore type at all: I supposed I must have taken it, as was natural, from the Callinghams.

And then, in my utter horror and loneliness, a still more awful and ghastly thought presented itself to me. This was my mother's hand I saw in the picture. Was it my mother, indeed, who wrought the murder? Was she living or dead? Had my father put upon her some grievous wrong? Had he pretended to get her out of the way? Had he buried her alive, so to speak, in some prison or madhouse? Had she returned in disguise from the asylum or the living grave to avenge herself and murder him? In my present frame of mind, no idea was too wild or too strange for me to entertain. If this strain continued much longer, I should go mad myself with suspense and horror!



CHAPTER X.

YET ANOTHER PHOTOGRAPH



Next morning my head ached. After all I'd suffered, I could hardly bear to recur to the one subject that now always occupied my thoughts. And yet, on the other hand, I couldn't succeed in banishing it. To relieve my mind a little, I took out the photographs I had brought from the box at The Grange, and began to sort them over according to probable date and subject.

They were of different periods, some old, some newer. I put them together in series, as well as I could, by the nature of the surroundings. The most recent of all were my father's early attempts at instantaneous electric photography—the attempts which led up at last to his automatic machine, the acmegraph, that produced all unconsciously the picture of the murder. Some of these comparatively recent proofs represented men running and horses trotting: but the best of all, tied together with a bit of tape, clearly belonged to a single set, and must have been taken at the same time at an athletic meeting. There was one of a flat race, viewed from a little in front, with the limbs of the runners in seemingly ridiculous attitudes, so instantaneous and therefore so grotesquely rigid were they. There was another of a high jump, seen from one side at the very moment of clearing the pole, so that the figure poised solid in mid-air as motionless as a statue. And there was a third, equally successful, of a man throwing the hammer, in which the hammer, in the same way, seemed to hang suspended of itself like Mahomet's coffin between earth and heaven.

But the one that attracted my attention the most was a photograph of an obstacle-race, in which the runners had to mount and climb over a wagon placed obtrusively sideways across the course on purpose to baffle them. This picture was taken from a few yards in the rear; and the athletes were seen in it in the most varied attitudes. Some of them were just climbing up one side of the wagon: others had mounted to the top ledge of the body: and one, standing on the further edge, was in the very act of leaping down to the ground in front of him. He was bent double, to spring, with a stoop like a hunchback, and balanced himself with one hand held tightly behind him.

As my eye fell on that figure, a cold thrill ran through me. For a moment I only knew something important had happened. Next instant I realised what the thrill portended. I could only see the man's back, to be sure, but I knew him in a second. I had no doubt as to who it was. This was HIM—the murderer!

Yes, yes! There could be no mistaking that arched round back that had haunted me so long in my waking dreams. I knew him at sight. It was the man I had seen on the night of the murder getting out of the window!

Perhaps I was overwrought. Perhaps my fancy ran away with me. But I didn't doubt for a second. I rose from my seat, and in a tremulous voice called Jane into the room. Without one word I laid both pictures down before her together. Jane glanced first at the one, then turned quickly to the other. A sharp little cry broke from her lips all unbidden. She saw it as fast and as instinctively as I had done.

"That's him!" she exclaimed, aghast, and as pale as a sheet. "That's him, right enough, Miss Una. That's the very same back! That's the very same hand! That's the man! That's the murderer!"

And indeed, this unanimity was sufficiently startling. For nothing could have been more different than the dress in the two cases. In the murder scene, the man seemed to wear a tweed suit and knickerbockers,—he was indistinct, as I said before, against the blurred light of the window: while in the athletic scene, he wore just a thin jersey and running-drawers, cut short at the knee, with his arms and legs bare, and his muscles contracted. Yet for all that, we both knew him for the same man at once. That stooping back was unmistakable; that position of the hand was characteristic and unique. We were sure he was the same man. I trembled with agitation. I had a clue to the murderer!

Yet, strange to say, that wasn't the first thought that occurred to my mind. In the relief of the moment, I looked up into Jane's eyes, and exclaimed with a sigh of profound relief:

"Then you see how mistaken you were about the hands and Aunt Emma!"

Jane looked close at the hand in the photograph once more.

"Well, it's curious," she said, slowly. "That's a man, sure enough: but he'd ought to be a Moore. The palm's your aunt's as clear as ever you could paint it!"

I glanced over her shoulder. She was perfectly right. It was a man beyond all doubt, the figure on the wagon. Yet the hand was Aunt Emma's, every line and every stroke of it; except, of course, the scars. Those, I saw at a glance, were wholly wanting.

And now I had really a clue to the murderer.

Yet how slight a clue! Just a photograph of men's backs. What men? When and where? It was an athletic meeting. Of what club or society? That was the next question now I had to answer. Instinctively I made up my mind to answer it myself, without giving any notice to the police of my discovery.

Perhaps I should never have been able to answer it at all but for one of the photographs which, as I thought, though lying loose by itself, formed part of the same series. It represented the end of a hundred-yard race, with the winners coming in at the tape by a pavilion with a flag-staff. On the staff a big flag was flying loosely in the wind. The folds hid half of the words on its centre from sight. But this much at least I could read:

"ER...OM..OY...LETI...UB."

I gazed at them long and earnestly. After a minute or two of thought, I made out the last two words. The inscription must surely be Something-or-other Athletic Club.

But what was "Er... om.. oy..."? That question staggered me. Gazing harder at it than ever, I could come to no conclusion. It was the name of a place, no doubt: but what place, I knew not.

"Er"? No, "Ber": just a suspicion of a B came round the corner of a fold. If B was the first letter, I might possibly identify it.

I took the photograph down to Aunt Emma, without telling her what I meant. She couldn't bear to think I was ever engaged in thinking of my First State at all.

"Can you read the inscription on that flag, auntie?" I asked. "It's an old photograph I picked up in the attic at The Grange, and I'd like to know, if I could, at what place it was taken."

Aunt Emma gazed at it long and earnestly. Her colour never changed. Then she shook her head quietly.

"I don't know the place," she said; "and I don't know the name. I can't quite make it out. That's E, and R, and O. You see, the letters in between might be almost anything."

I wasn't going to be put off, however, with the port thus in sight. One fact was almost certain. Wherever that pavilion might be, the murderer was there on the day unknown when those photo-graphs were taken. And whatever that day might be, my father and the murderer were there together. That brought the two into connection, and brought me one step nearer a solution than ever the police had been; for hitherto no one had even pretended to have the slightest clue to the personality of the man who jumped out of the window.

I went into the library and took down the big atlas. Opening the map of England and Wales, I began a hopeless search, county by county, from Northumberland downward, for any town or village that would fit these mysterious letters. It was a wild and foolish idea. In the first place not a quarter of the villages were marked in the map; and in the second place, my brain soon got muddled and dazed with trying to fit in the names with the letters on the flag. Two hours had passed away, and I'd only got as far down as Lancashire and Durham. And, most probably even so, I would never come upon it.

Then suddenly, a bright idea broke on my brain at once. The Index! The Index! Presumably, as no fold seemed to obscure the first words, the name began with what looked like a B. That was always something.

A man would have thought of that at once, of course: but then, I have the misfortune to be only a woman.

I turned to the Index in haste, and looked down it with hurried eyes. Almost sooner than I could have hoped, the riddle unread itself. "Ber-, Berb-, Berc-, Berd-," I read out: "Berkshire: Berham: Berhampore: that won't do: Berlin: Berling: Bernina: Berry—what's that? Oh, great heavens!"—my brain reeled—"Berry Pomeroy!"

It was as clear as day. How could I have missed it before? There it seemed to stand out almost legible on the flagstaff. I read it now with ease: "Berry Pomeroy Athletic Club."

I looked up the map once more, following the lines with my fingers, till I found the very place where the name was printed. A village in Devonshire, not far from Torquay. Yes! That's it; Berry Pomeroy. The murderer was there on the day of that athletic meeting!

My heart came up into my mouth with mingled horror and triumph. I felt like a bloodhound who gets on the trail of his man. I would track him down now, no doubt—my father's murderer!

I had no resentment against him, no desire for vengeance. But I had a burning wish to free myself from this environing mystery.

I wouldn't tell the police or the inspector, however, what clue I had obtained. I'd find it all out for myself without anyone's help. I remembered what Dr. Marten had said, and determined to be wise. I'd work on my own lines till all was found out: and then, be it who it might, I sternly resolved I'd let justice be done on him.

So I said nothing even to Jane about the discovery I'd just made. I said nothing to anybody till we sat down at dinner. Then, in the course of conversation, I got on the subject of Devonshire.

"Auntie," I ventured to ask at last, in a very casual way, "did I ever, so far as you know, go anywhere near a place called Berry Pomeroy?"

Aunt Emma gave a start.

"Oh, darling, why do you ask?" she cried.

"You don't mean to say you remember that, do you? What do you want to know for, Una? You can't possibly recollect your Torquay visit, surely!"

I trembled all over. Then I was on the right track!

"Was I ever at Torquay?" I asked once more, as firmly as I could. "And when I was there, did I go over one day to Berry Pomeroy?"

Aunt Emma grew all at once as white as death.

"This is wonderful!" she cried in an agitated voice. "This is wonderful—wonderful! If you can remember that, my child, you can remember anything."

"I DON'T remember it auntie," I answered, not liking to deceive her. "To tell you the truth, I simply guessed at it. But when and why was I at Torquay? Please tell me. And did I go to Berry Pomeroy?" For I stuck to my point, and meant to get it out of her.

Aunt Emma gazed at me fixedly.

"You went to Torquay, dear," she said in a very slow voice, "in the spring of the same year your poor father was killed: that's more than four years ago. The Willie Moores live at Torquay, and several more of your cousins. You went to stop with Willie's wife, and you stayed five weeks. I don't know whether you ever went over to Berry Pomeroy. You may have, and you mayn't: it's within an easy driving distance. Minnie Moore has often written to ask me whether you could go there again; Minnie was always fond of you, and thinks you'd remember her: but I've been afraid to allow you, for fear it should recall sad scenes. She's about your own age, Minnie is; and she's a daughter of Willie Moore, who's my own first cousin, and of course your dear mother's."

I never hesitated a moment. I was strung up too tightly by that time.

"Auntie dear," I said quietly, "I go to-morrow to Torquay. I must know all now. I must hunt up these people."

Auntie knew from my tone it was no use trying to stand in my way any longer.

"Very well, dear," she said resignedly. "I don't believe it's good for you: but you must do as you like. You have your father's will, Una. You were always headstrong."



CHAPTER XI.

THE VISION RECURS



I hated asking auntie questions, they seemed to worry and distress her so; but that evening, in view of my projected visit to Torquay, I was obliged to cross-examine her rather closely about many things. I wanted to know about my Torquay relations, and as far as possible about my mother's family. In the end I learned that the Willie Moores were cousins of ours on my mother's side who had never quarrelled with my father, like Aunt Emma, and through whom alone accordingly, in the days of my First State, Aunt Emma was able to learn anything about me. They had a house at Torquay, and connections all around; for the Moores were Devonshire people. Aunt Emma was very anxious, if I went down there at all, I should stop with Mrs. Moore: for Minnie would be so grieved, she said, if I went to an hotel or took private lodgings. But I wouldn't hear of that myself. I knew nothing of the Moores—in my present condition—and I didn't like to trust myself in the hands of those who to me were perfect strangers. So I decided on going to the Imperial Hotel, and calling on the Moores quietly to pursue my investigation.

Another question I asked in the course of the evening. I had wondered about it often, and now, in these last straits, curiosity overcame me.

"Aunt Emma," I said unexpectedly after a pause, without one word of introduction, "how ever did you get those scars on your hand? You've never told me."

In a moment, Aunt Emma blushed suddenly crimson like a girl of eighteen.

"Una," she answered very gravely, in a low strange tone, "oh, don't ask me about that, dear. Don't ask me about that. You could never understand it.... I got them... in climbing over a high stone wall... a high stone wall, with bits of glass stuck on top of it."

In spite of her prohibition, I couldn't help asking one virtual question more. I gave a start of horror:

"Not the wall at The Grange!" I cried. "Oh, Aunt Emma, how wonderful!"

She gazed at me, astonished.

"Yes, the wall at The Grange," she said simply. "But I don't know how you guessed it.... Oh, Una, don't talk to me any more about these things, I implore you. You can't think how they grieve me. They distress me unspeakably."

Much as I longed to know, I couldn't ask her again after that. She was trembling like an aspen-leaf. For some minutes we sat and looked at the fireplace in silence.

Then curiosity overcame me again.

"Only one question more, auntie," I said. "When I came to you first, you were at home here at Barton. You didn't come to Woodbury to fetch me after the murder. You didn't attend the inquest. I've often wondered at that. Why didn't you bring me yourself? Why didn't you hurry to nurse me as soon as you heard they'd shot my father?"

Aunt Emma gazed at me again with a face like a sheet.

"Darling," she said, quivering, "I was ill. I was in bed. I was obliged to stay away. I'd hurt myself badly a little before.... Oh, Una, leave off! If you go on like this, you'll drive me mad. Say no more, I implore of you."

I couldn't think what this meant; but as auntie wished it, I held my peace, all inwardly trembling with suppressed excitement.

That night, when I went up to bed, I lay awake long, thinking to myself of the Australian scene. In the silence of the night it came back to me vividly. Rain pattered on the roof, and helped me to remember it. I could see the blue-gum trees waving their long ribbon-like leaves in the wind: I could see the cottage, the verandah, my mother, our dog: nay, even, I remembered now, with a burst of recollection, his name was Carlo. The effort was more truly a recollection than before: it was part of myself: I felt aware it was really I myself, not another, who had seen all this, and lived and moved in it.

Slowly I fell asleep, and passed from thinking to dreaming. My dream was but a prolongation of the thoughts I had been turning over in my waking mind. I was still in Australia; still on the verandah of our wooden house; and my mamma was there, and papa beside her. I knew it was papa; for I held his hand and played with him. But he was so much altered, so grave and severe; though he smiled at me good-humouredly. Mamma was sitting behind, with baby on her lap. It seemed to me quite natural she should be there with baby. The scene was so distinct—very vivid and clear. It persisted for many minutes, perhaps even hours. It burnt itself into my brain. At last, it woke me up by its very intensity.

As I woke, a great many thoughts crowded in upon me all at once. This time I knew instantly it was no mere dream, but a true recollection. Yet what a strange recollection! how unexpeted! how incomprehensible! How much in it to settle! how much to investigate and hunt up and inquire about!

In the first place, though I was still in my dream a little girl, much time must have elapsed since the earlier vision; for my papa looked far older, and graver, and sterner. He had more hair about his face, too, a long brown beard and heavy moustache; and when I gazed hard at him mentally, I could recognise the likeness with the white-bearded man who lay dead on the floor: while in my former recollection, I could scarcely make out any resemblance of the features. This showed that the second scene came long after the first: my father must by that time have begun to resemble his later self. A weird feeling stole over me. Was I going to relive my previous life, piecemeal? Was the past going to unroll itself in slow but regular panorama to my sleeping vision? Was my First State to become known like this in successive scenes to my Second?

But that wasn't all. There were strange questions to decide, too, about this new dream of dead days. What could be the meaning of that mysterious baby? She seemed to be so vivid, so natural, so real; her presence there was so much a pure matter of course to me, that I couldn't for a moment separate her from the rest of the Picture. I REMEMBERED the baby, now; as I remembered my mother, and my father, and Australia. There was no room for doubt as to that. The baby was an integral part of my real recollection. Floating across the dim ocean of years, I was certain that night I had once lived in such a scene, with my mamma, and baby.

Yet oh, what baby? I never had a brother or sister of my own, except the half-sister that died—the clergyman's child, Mary Wharton. And Mary, from what I had learned from Aunt Emma and others, must have died when I was only just five months old, immediately before we left Australia. How, then, could I remember her, even in this exalted mental state of trance or dream? And, above all, how could I remember a far earlier scene, when my papa was younger, when his face was smooth, and when there was no other baby?

This mystery only heightened the other mysteries which surrounded my life. I was surfeited with them now. In very despair and listlessness, I turned round on my side, and dozed dreamily off again, unable to grapple with it.

But still that scene haunted me. And still, even in sleep, I asked myself over and over again, "How on earth can this be? What's the meaning of the baby?"

Perhaps it was a little sister that died young, whom I never had heard of. And perhaps not. In a life such as mine, new surprises are always possible.



CHAPTER XII.

THE MOORES OF TORQUAY



Strange to say, in spite of everything, my sleep refreshed me. I woke up in the morning strong and vigorous—thank goodness, I have physically a magnificent constitution—and packed my box, with Jane's help, for my Torquay expedition.

I went up to London and down to Torquay alone, though Jane offered to accompany me. I was learning to be self-reliant. It suited my plans better. Nobody could bear this burden for me but myself; and the sooner I learnt to bear it my own way, the happier for me.

At Torquay station, to my great surprise, a fresh-looking girl of my own age rushed up to me suddenly, and kissed me without one word of warning. She was a very pretty girl, pink-cheeked and hazel-eyed: and as she kissed me, she seized both my hands in hers, and cried out to me frankly:

"Why, there you are, Una dear! Cousin Emma telegraphed us what train you'd arrive by; so I've driven down to meet you. And now, you're coming up with us this very minute in the pony-carriage."

"You're Minnie Moore, I suppose?" I said, gazing at her admiringly. Her sweet, frank smile and apple-blossom cheek somehow inspired me with confidence.

She looked back at me quite distressed. Tears rose at once into her eyes with true Celtic suddenness.

"Oh, Una," she cried, deeply hurt and drawing back into her shell, "don't tell me you don't know me! Why, I'm Minnie! Minnie!"

My heart went out to her at once. I took her hand in mine again.

"Minnie dear," I said softly, quite remorseful for my mistake, "you must remember what has happened to me, and not be angry. I've forgotten everything, even my own past life. I've forgotten that I ever before set eyes upon you. But, my dear, there's one thing I've NOT in a way forgotten; and that is, that I loved you and love you dearly. And I 'll give you a proof of it. When I started, I knew none of you; and I told Aunt Emma I wouldn't go among strangers. The moment I see you, I know you're no stranger, but a very dear cousin. When I've forgotten MYSELF, how can I remember YOU? But I'll go up with you at once. And I'll countermand the room I ordered by telegram at the Imperial."

The tears stood fuller in Minnie's eyes than before. She clasped my hand hard. Her pretty lips trembled.

"Una darling," she said, "we always were friends, and we always shall be. If you love me, that's all. You're a darling. I love you."

I looked at her sweet face, and knew it was true. And oh, I was so glad to have a new friend—an old friend, already! For somehow, as always, while the intellectual recollection had faded, the emotion survived. I felt as if I'd known Minnie Moore for years, though I never remembered to have seen her in my life till that minute.

Well, I remained at the Moores' for a week, and felt quite at home there. They were all very nice, Cousin Willie, and Aunt Emily (she made me call her aunt; she said I'd always done so), and Minnie, and all of them. They were really dear people; and blood, after all, is thicker than water. But I made no haste to push inquiries just at first. I preferred to feel my way. I wanted to find out what they knew, if anything, about Berry Pomeroy.

The first time I ventured to mention the subject to Minnie, she gave a very queer smile—a smile of maidenly badinage.

"Well, you remember THAT, any way," she said, in a teasing little way, looking down at me and laughing. "I thought you'd remember that. I must say you enjoyed yourself wonderfully at Berry Pomeroy!"

"Remember what?" I cried, all eagerness; for I saw she attached some special importance to the recollection. And yet, it was terrible she should jest about the clue to my father's murderer!

Minnie looked arch. When she looked arch, she was charming.

"Why, I never saw you prettier or more engaging in your life than you were that day," she said evasively, as if trying to pique me. "And you flirted so much, too! And everybody admired you so. Everybody on the grounds... especially one person!"

I looked up at her in surprise. I was in my own room, seated by the dressing-table, late at night, when we'd gone up to bed; and Minnie was beside me, standing up, with her bedroom candle in that pretty white little hand of hers.

"What do you mean?" I exclaimed eagerly. "Was it a dance—or a picnic?"

"Oh, you know very well," Minnie went on teasingly, "though you pretend you forget. HE was there, don't you know. You must remember HIM, if you've forgotten all the rest of your previous life. You say you remember the appropriate emotions. Well, he was an emotion: at least, you thought so. It was an Athletic Club Meeting: and Dr. Ivor was there. He went across on his bicycle."

I gave a start of surprise. Minnie looked down at me half maliciously.

"There, you see," she said archly again, "at Dr. Ivor you change colour. I told you you'd remember him!"

I grew pale with astonishment.

"Minnie dear," I said, holding her hands very tight in my own, "it wasn't that, I assure you. I've forgotten him, utterly. If ever I knew a Dr. Ivor, if ever I flirted with him, as you seem to imply, he's gone clean out of my head. His name stirs no chord—recalls absolutely nothing. But I want to know about that Athletic Meeting. Was my poor father there that day? And did he take a set of photographs?"

Minnie clapped her hands triumphantly.

"I KNEW you remembered!" she cried. "Of course, Cousin Vivian was there. We drove over in a break. You MUST remember that. And he took a whole lot of instantaneous photographs."

My hand trembled violently in my cousin's. I felt I was now on the very eve of a great discovery.

"Minnie," I said, tentatively, "do you think your papa would drive us over some day and—and show us the place again?"

"Of course he would, dear," Minnie answered, with a gentle pressure of my hand. "He'd be only too delighted. Whatever you choose. You know you were always such a favourite of daddy's."

I knew nothing of the sort; but I was glad to learn it. I drew Minnie out a little more about the Athletics and my visit to Berry Pomeroy. She wouldn't tell me much: she was too illusive and indefinite: she never could get the notion out of her head, somehow, that I remembered all about it, and was only pretending to forgetfulness. But I gathered from what she said, that Dr. Ivor and I must have flirted a great deal; or, at least, that he must have paid me a good lot of attention. My father didn't like it, Minnie said; he thought Dr. Ivor wasn't well enough off to marry me. He was a distant cousin of ours, of course—everything was always "of course" with that dear bright Minnie—what, didn't I know that? Oh, yes, his mother was one of the Moores of Barnstaple, cousin Edward's people. His name was Courtenay Moore Ivor, you know—though I knew nothing of the sort. And he was awfully clever. And, oh, so handsome!

"Is he at Berry Pomeroy still?" I asked, trembling, thinking this would be a good person to get information from about the people at the Athletic Sports.

"Oh dear, no," Minnie answered, looking hard at me, curiously. "He was never at Berry Pomeroy. He had a practice at Babbicombe. He's in Canada now, you know. He went over six months after Cousin Vivian's death. I think, dear,"—she hesitated,—"he never QUITE got over your entirely forgetting him, even if you forgot your whole past history."

This was a curious romance to me, that Minnie thus sprang on me—a romance of my own past life of which I myself knew nothing.

We sat late talking, and I could see Minnie was very full indeed of Dr. Ivor. Over and over again she recurred to his name, and always as though she thought it might rouse some latent chord in my memory. But nothing came of it. If ever I had cared for Dr. Ivor at all, that feeling had passed away utterly with the rest of my experiences.

When Minnie rose to go, I took her hand once more in mine. As I did so, I started. Something about it seemed strangely familiar. I looked at it close with a keen glance. Why, this was curious! It was Aunt Emma's hand: it was my mother's hand: it was the hand in my mental Picture: it was the hand of the murderer!

"It's just like auntie's," I said with an effort, seeing Minnie noticed my start.

She looked at it and laughed.

"The Moore hand," she said gaily. "We all have it, except you. It's awfully persistent."

I turned it over in front and examined the palm. At sight of it my brain reeled. This was surely magic! Minnie Moore's hand, too, was scarred over with cuts, exactly like Aunt Emma's!"

"Why, how on earth did you do that?" I cried, thunderstruck at the discovery.

But Minnie only laughed again, a bright girlish laugh.

"Climbing over that beastly wall at The Grange," she said with a merry look. "Oh, what fun we did have! We climbed it together. We were dreadful tomboys in those days, dear, you and I: but you were luckier than I was, and didn't cut yourself with the bottle-glass."

This was too surprising to be passed over unnoticed. When Minnie was gone, I lay awake and pondered about it. Had all the Moores got scars on their hands, I wondered? And how many people, I asked myself, had cut themselves time and again in climbing over that barricaded garden-wall of my father's?

The Moore hand might be hereditary, but not surely the scars. Was the murderer, then, a Moore, and was that the meaning of Dr. Marten's warning?



CHAPTER XIII.

DR. IVOR OF BABBICOMBE



Two days later, Cousin Willie drove us over to Berry Pomeroy. The lion of the place is the castle, of course; but Minnie had told him beforehand I wanted, for reasons of my own, to visit the cricket-field where the sports were held "the year Dr. Ivor won the mile race, you remember." So we went there straight. As soon as we entered, I recognised the field at once, and the pavilion, and the woods, as being precisely the same as those presented in the photograph. But I got no further than that. The captain of the cricket-club was on the ground that day, and I managed to get into conversation with him, and strolled off in the grounds. There I showed him the photograph, and asked if he could identify the man climbing over the wagon: but he said he couldn't recognise him. Somebody or other from Torquay, perhaps; not a regular resident. The figures were so small, and so difficult to make sure about. If I'd leave him the photograph, perhaps—but at that I drew back, for I didn't want anybody, least of all at Torquay, to know what quest I was engaged upon.

We drove back, a merry party enough, in spite of my failure. Minnie was always so jolly, and her mirth was contagious. She talked all the way still of Dr. Ivor, half-teasing me. It was all very well my pretending not to remember, she said; but why did I want to see the cricket-field if it wasn't for that? Poor Courtenay! if only he knew, how delighted he'd be to know he wasn't forgotten! For he really took it to heart, my illness—she always called it my illness, and so I suppose it was. From the day I lost my memory, nothing seemed to go right with him; and he was never content till he went and buried himself somewhere in the wilds of Canada.

That evening again, I sat with Minnie in my room. I was depressed and distressed. I didn't want to cry before Minnie, but I could have cried with good heart for sheer vexation. Of course I couldn't bear to go showing the photograph to all the world, and letting everybody see I'd made myself a sort of amateur detective. They would mistake my motives so. And yet I didn't know how I was ever to find out my man any other way. It was that or nothing. I made up my mind I would ask Cousin Willie.

I took out the photograph, as if unintentionally, when I went to my box, and laid it down with my curling-tongs on the table close by Minnie. Minnie took it up abstractedly and looked at it with an indefinite gaze.

"Why, this is the cricket-field!" she cried, as soon as she collected her senses. "One of your father's experiments. The earliest acmegraphs. How splendidly they come out! See, that's Sir Everard at the bottom; and there's little Jack Hillier above; and this on one side's Captain Brooks; and there, in front of all—well, you know HIM anyhow, Una. Now, don't pretend you forget! That's Courtenay Ivor!"

Her finger was on the man who stood poised ready to jump. With an awful recoil, I drew back and suppressed a scream. It was on the tip of my tongue to cry out, "Why, that's my father's murderer!"

But, happily, with a great effort of will I restrained myself. I saw it all at a glance. That, then, was the meaning of Dr. Marten's warning! No wonder, I thought, the shock had disorganised my whole brain. If Minnie was right, I was in love once with that man. And I must have seen my lover murder my father!

For I didn't doubt, from what Minnie said, I had really once loved Dr. Ivor. Horrible and ghastly as it might be to realise it, I didn't doubt it was the truth. I had once loved the very man I was now bent on pursuing as a criminal and a murderer!

"You're sure that's him, Minnie?" I cried, trying to conceal my agitation. "You're sure that's Courtenay Ivor, the man stooping on the wagon-top?"

Minnie looked at me, smiling. She thought I was asking for a very different reason.

"Yes, that's him, right enough, dear," she said. "I could tell him among a thousand. Why, the Moore hand alone would be quite enough to know him by. It's just like my own. We've all of us got it—except yourself. I always said you weren't one of us. You're a regular born Callingham."

I gazed at her fixedly. I could hardly speak.

"Oh, Minnie!" I cried once more, "have you ... have you any photograph of him?"

"No, we haven't, dear," Minnie answered.

"That was a fad of Courtenay's, you know. Wherever he went, he'd never be photographed. He was annoyed that day that your father should have taken him unawares. He hated being 'done,' he said. He's so handsome and so nice, but he's not a bit conceited. And he was such a splendid bicyclist! He rode over and back on his bicycle that day, and then ran in all the races as if it were nothing."

A light burst over me at once. This was circumstantial evidence. The murderer who disappeared as if by magic the moment his crime was committed must have come and gone all unseen, no doubt, on his bicycle. He must have left it under the window till his vile deed was done, and then leapt out upon it in a second and dashed off whence he came like a flash of lightning.

It was a premeditated crime, in that case, not the mere casual result of a sudden quarrel.

I must find out this man now, were it only to relieve my own sense of mystery.

"Minnie," I said once more, screwing up my courage to ask, "where's Dr. Ivor now? I mean—that is to say—in what part of Canada?"

Minnie looked at me and laughed.

"There, I told you so!" she said, merrily. "It's not the least bit of use your pretending you're not in love with him, Una. Why, just look how you tremble! You're as white as a ghost! And then you say you don't care for poor Courtenay! I forget the exact name of the place where he lives, but I've got it in my desk, and I can tell you to-morrow.—Oh, yes; it's Palmyra, on the Canada Pacific. I suppose you want to write to him. Or perhaps you mean to go out and offer yourself bodily."

It was awful having to bottle up the truth in one's own heart, and to laugh and jest like this; but I endured it somehow.

"No, it's not that," I said gravely. "I've other reasons of my own for asking his address, Minnie. I want to go out there, it's true; but not because I cherish the faintest pleasing recollection of Dr. Ivor in any way."

Minnie scanned me over in surprise.

"Well, how you ARE altered, Una!" she cried. "I love you, dear, and like you every bit as much as ever. But you've changed so much. I don't think you're at all what you used to be. You're so grave and sombre."

"No wonder, Minnie," I exclaimed, bursting gladly into tears—the excuse was such a relief—"no wonder, when you think how much I've passed through!"

Minnie flung her arms around my neck, and kissed me over and over again.

"Oh, dear!" she cried, melting. "What have I done? What have I said? I ought never to have spoken so. It was cruel of me—cruel, Una dear. I shall stop here to-night, and sleep with you."

"Oh, thank you, darling!" I cried. "Minnie, that IS good of you. I'm so awfully glad. For to-morrow I must be thinking of getting ready for Canada."

"Canada!" Minnie exclaimed, alarmed. "You're not really going to Canada! Oh, Una, you're joking! You don't mean to say you're going out there to find him!"

I took her hand in mine, and held it up in the air above her head solemnly.

"Dear cousin," I said, "I love you. But you must promise me this one thing. Whatever may happen, give me your sacred word of honour you'll never tell anybody what we've said here to-night. You'll kill me if you do. I don't want any living soul on earth to know of it."

I spoke so seriously, Minnie felt it was important.

"I promise you," she answered, growing suddenly far graver than her wont. "Oh, Una, I haven't the faintest idea what you mean, but no torture on earth shall ever wring a word of it from me!"

So I went to bed in her arms, and cried myself to sleep, thinking with my latest breath, in a tremor of horror, that I'd found it at last. Courtenay Ivor was the name of my father's murderer!



CHAPTER XIV.

MY WELCOME TO CANADA



The voyage across the Atlantic was long and uneventful. No whales, no icebergs, no excitement of any sort. My fellow-passengers said it was as dull as it was calm. But as for me, I had plenty to occupy my mind meanwhile. Strange things had happened in the interval, and were happening to me on the way. Strange things, in part, of my own internal history.

For before I left England, as I sat with Aunt Emma in her little drawing-room at Barton-on-the-Sea, discussing my plans and devising routes westward, she made me, quite suddenly, an unexpected confession.

"Una," she said, after a long pause, "you haven't told me, my dear, why you're going to Canada. And I don't want to ask you. I know pretty well. We needn't touch upon that. You're going to hunt up some supposed clue to the murderer."

"Perhaps so, Auntie," I said oracularly: "and perhaps not."

For I didn't want it to get talked about and be put into all the newspapers. And I knew now if I wanted to keep it out, I must first be silent.

Aunt Emma drew nearer and took my hand in hers. At the same time, she held up the other scarred and lacerated palm.

"Do you know when I got that, Una?" she asked with a sudden burst. "Well, I'll tell you, my child.... It was the night of your father's death. And I got it climbing over the wall at The Grange, to escape detection."

My blood ran cold once more. What on earth could this mean? Had Auntie—? But no. I had the evidence of my own senses that it was Courtenay Ivor. I'd tracked him down now. There was no room for doubt. The man on the wagon was the man who fired the shot. I could have sworn to that bent back, of my own knowledge, among a thousand.

I hadn't long to wait, however. Auntie went on after a short pause.

"I was there," she said, "by accident, trying for once to see you."

I looked at her fixedly still, and still I said nothing.

"I was stopping with friends at the time, ten miles off from Woodbury," Aunt Emma went on, smoothing my hand with hers, "and I longed so to see you. I came over by train that day, and stopped late about the town in hopes I might meet you in the street. But I was disappointed. Towards evening I ventured even to go into the grounds of The Grange, and look about everywhere on the chance that I might see you. Perhaps your father might be out. I went round towards the window, which I now know to be the library. As I went, I saw a bicycle leaning up against the wall by the window. I thought that must be some visitor, but still I went on. But just as I reached the window, I saw a flash of electric light; and by the light, I could make out your father's head and beard. He looked as if he were talking angrily and loudly to somebody. The window was open. I was afraid to stop longer. In a sudden access of fear, I ran across the shrubbery towards the garden-wall. To tell you the truth, I was horribly frightened. Why, I don't know; for nothing had happened as yet. I suppose it was just the dusk and the mean sense of intrusion."

She paused and wiped her brow. I sat still, and listened eagerly.

"Presently," she went on, very low, "as I ran and ran, I heard behind me a loud crash—a sound as of a pistol-shot. That terrified me still more. I thought I was being pursued. Perhaps they took me for a burglar. In the agony of my terror, I rushed at the wall in mad haste, and climbed over it anyhow. In climbing, I tore my hand, as you see, and made myself bleed, oh, terribly! However, I persevered, and got down on the other side, with my clothes very little the worse for the scramble. And, fortunately, I was carrying a small light dust-cloak: I put it on at once, and it covered up everything. Then I began to walk along the road as fast as I could in the direction of the station. As I did so, a bicycle shot out from the gate in the opposite direction, going as hard as it could spin, simply flying towards Whittingham. Three minutes later, a man came up to me, breathless. It was the gardener at The Grange, I believe.

"'Have you seen anybody go this way?' he asked. 'A young man, running hard? A young man in knickerbockers?'

"'N—no,' I answered, trembling; for I was afraid to confess. 'Not a soul has gone past!'

"Of course, I didn't know of the murder as yet; and I only wanted to get off unperceived to the station.

"I'd bound up my hand in my handkerchief by that time, and held it tight under my cloak. I went back by train unnoticed, and returned to my friends' house. I hadn't even told them I was going to Woodbury at all. I pretended I'd been spending the day at Whittingham. Next morning, I read in the paper of your father's murder."

I stared hard at Aunt Emma.

"Why didn't you tell me this long ago?" I cried, in an agony of suspense. "Why didn't you give evidence and say so at the inquest?"

"How could I?" Aunt Emma answered, looking back at me appealingly. "The circumstances were too suspicious. As it was, everybody was running after the young man in knickerbockers. Nobody took any notice of a little old lady in a long grey dust-cloak. But if once I'd confessed and shown my wounded hand, who would ever have believed I'd nothing to do with the murder?—except you, perhaps, Una. Oh no: I came back here to my own home as fast as ever I could; for I was really ill. I took to my bed at once. And as nobody called me to give evidence at the inquest, I said nothing to anybody."

"But the bicycle!" I cried. "The bicycle! You ought to have mentioned that. You were the only one who saw it. It was a clue to the murderer."

"If I'd told," Aunt Emma answered, "I should never have been allowed to take charge of you at all. I thought my one clear duty was to my sister's child: it was to take care of your health in your shattered condition. And even now, Una, I tell you only for this: if you find out anything new, in Canada or here, try not to drag me into it. I couldn't stand the strain. Cross-examination would kill me."

"I'll remember it, auntie," I said, wearied out with excitement. "But I think you did wrong, all the same. In a case like this, it's everybody's first duty to tell all he knows, in the interests of justice."

However, this confession of Aunt Emma's rendered one thing more certain to me than ever before. I was sure I was on the right track now, after Courtenay Ivor. The bicycle clinched the proof.

But I said nothing as yet to the police, or to my friendly Inspector. I was determined to hunt the whole thing up on my own account first, and then deliver my criminal, when fully secured, to the laws of my country.

Not that I was vindictive. Not that I wanted to punish the man. No; I shrank terribly from the task. But to relieve myself from this persistent sense of surrounding mystery, and to free others from suspicion, I felt compelled to discover him. It seemed to me like a duty laid upon me from without. I dared not shirk it.

On the way out to Quebec, the sea seemed to revive strange memories. I had never crossed it before, except long, long ago, on my way home from Australia. And now that I sat on deck, in a wicker-chair, and looked at the deep dark waves by myself, I began once more, in vague snatches, to recall that earlier voyage. It came back to me all of itself. And that was quite in keeping with my previous recollections. My past life, I felt sure, was unfolding itself slowly to me in regular succession, from childhood onward.

Sitting there on the quarter-deck, gazing hard at the waves, I remembered how I had played on a similar ship years and years before, a little girl in short frocks, with my mamma in a long folding-chair beside me. I could see my mamma, with a sort of frightened smile on her poor pale face; and she looked so unhappy. My papa was there too, somewhat older and greyer—very unlike the papa of my first Australian picture. His face was so much hairier. Mamma cried a good deal at times, and papa tried to comfort her. Besides, what struck me most, there was no more baby. I wasn't even allowed to speak about baby. That subject was tabooed—perhaps because it always made mamma cry so much, and press me hard to her bosom. At any rate, I remembered how once I spoke of baby to some fellow-passenger in the saloon, and papa was very angry, and caught me up in his arms and took me down to my berth; and there I had to stop all day by myself (though it was rolling hard) and could have no fruit for dinner, because I'd been naughty. I was strictly enjoined never to mention baby to anyone again, either then or at any time. I was to forget all about her.

Day after day, as we sailed on, reminiscences of the same sort crowded thicker and thicker upon me. Never reminiscences of my later life, but always early scenes brought up by distinct suggestion of that Australian voyage. When we passed a ship, it burst upon me how we'd passed such ships before: when there was fire-drill on deck, I remembered having assisted years earlier at just such fire-drill. The whole past came back like a dream, so that I could reconstruct now the first five or six years of my life almost entirely. And yet, even so there was a gap, a puzzle, a difficulty somehow. I couldn't make the chronology of this slow-returning memory fit in as it ought with the chronology of the facts given to me by Aunt Emma and the Moores of Torquay. There was a constant discrepancy. It seemed to me that I must be a year or two older at least than they made me out. I remembered the voyage home far too well for my age. I fancied I went back further in my Australian recollections than would be possible from the dates Aunt Emma assigned me.

Slowly, as I compared these mental pictures of my first childhood one with the other, a strange fact seemed to loom forth, incomprehensible, incredible. When first it struck me, all unnerved as I was, my reason staggered before it. But it was true, none the less: quite true, I felt certain. Had I had two papas, then?—for the pictures differed so. Was one, clean-shaven, trim, and in a linen coat, the same as the other, older, graver, and sterner, with much hair on his face, and a rough sort of look, whom I saw more persistently in my later childish memories? I could hardly believe it. One man couldn't alter so greatly in a few short years. Yet I thought of them both alike quite unquestioningly as papa: I thought of them too, I fancied, in a dim sort of way, as one and the same person.

These fresh mysteries occupied my mind for the greater part of that uneventful voyage. To throw them off, I laughed and talked as much as possible with the rest of the passengers. Indeed, I gained the reputation of being "an awfully jolly girl," so heartily did I throw myself into all the games and amusements, to escape from the burden of my pressing thoughts: and I believe many old ladies on board were thoroughly scandalised that a woman whose father had been brutally murdered should ever be able to seem so bright and lively again. How little they knew! And what a world of mystery seemed to oppress and surround me!

At last, early one morning, we reached the Gulf, and took in our pilot off the Straits of Belleisle. I was on deck at the time, playing a game called "Shovelboard." As the pilot reached the ship, he took the captain's hand, and, to my immense surprise, said in an audible voice:

"So you've the famous Miss Callingham for a passenger, I hear, this voyage. There's the latest Quebec papers. You'll see you're looked for. Our people are expecting her."

I rushed forward, fiery hot, and with a trembling hand took one of the papers he was distributing all round, right and left, to the people on deck. It was unendurable that the memory of that one event should thus dog me through life with such ubiquitous persistence. I tore open the sheet. There, with horrified eyes, I read this hateful paragraph, in the atrociously vulgar style of Transatlantic journalism:

"The Sarmatian, expected off Belleisle to-morrow morning, brings among her passengers, as we learn by telegram, the famous Una Callingham, whose connection with the so-called Woodbury Mystery is now a matter of historical interest. The mysterious two-souled lady possesses, at present, all her faculties intact, as before the murder, and is indeed, people say, a remarkably spry and intelligent young person; but she has most conveniently forgotten all the events of her past life, and more particularly the circumstances of her father's death, which is commonly conjectured to have been due to the pistol of some unknown lover. Such freaks of memory are common, we all know, in the matter of small debts and of newspaper subscriptions, but they seldom extend quite so far as the violent death of a near relation. However, Una knows her own business best. The Sarmatian is due alongside the Bonsecours Quay at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, the 10th; and all Quebec will, no doubt, be assembled at the landing-stage to say 'Good-morning' to the two-souled lady."

The paper dropped from my hand. This was too horrible for anything! How I was ever to go through the ordeal of the landing at Quebec after that, I hadn't the faintest conception. And was I to be dogged and annoyed like this through all my Canadian trip by anonymous scribblers? Had these people no hearts? no consideration for the sensitiveness of an English lady?

I looked over the side of the ship at the dark-blue water. Oh, how I longed to plunge into it and be released for ever from this abiding nightmare!



CHAPTER XV.

A NEW ACQUAINTANCE



The moment we reached the quay at Quebec, some two days later, a dozen young men, with little notebooks in their hands, jumped on board all at once.

"Miss Callingham!" they cried with one accord, making a dash for the quarter-deck. "Which is she? Oh, this!—If you please, Miss Callingham, I should like to have ten minutes of your time to interview you!"

I clapped my hands to my ears, and stood back, all horrified. What I should have done, I don't know, but for a very kind man in a big rough overcoat, who had jumped on board at the same time, and made over to me like the reporters. He stepped up to me at once, pushed aside the young men, and said in a most friendly tone:

"Miss Callingham, I think? You'd better come with me, then. These people are all sharks. Everybody in Quebec's agog to see the Two- souled Lady. Answer no questions at all. Take not the least notice of them. Just follow me to the Custom House. Let them rave, but don't speak to them."

"Who are you?" I asked blindly, clinging to his arm in my terror.

"I'm a policeman in plain clothes," my new friend answered; "and I've been specially detailed by order for this duty. I'm here to look after you. You've friends in Canada, though you may have quite forgotten them. They've sent me to help you. Those are two of my chums there, standing aside by the gangway. We'll walk you off between us. Don't be afraid.—Here, you sir, there; make way!—No one shall come near you."

I was so nervous, and so ashamed that I accepted my strange escort without inquiry or remonstrance. He helped me, with remarkable politeness for a common policeman, across to the Custom House, where I sat waiting for my luggage. Reporters and sightseers, meanwhile, pressed obtrusively around me. My protector held them back. I was half wild with embarrassment. I'm naturally a reserved and somewhat sensitive girl, and this American publicity made me crimson with bashfulness.

As I sat there waiting, however, the two other policemen to whom my champion had beckoned sat one on each side of me, keeping off the idle crowd, while my first friend looked after the luggage and saw it safely through the Customs for me. He must be an Inspector, I fancied, or some other superior officer, the officials were so deferential to him. I gave him my keys, and he looked after everything himself. I had nothing, for my part, to do but to sit and wait patiently for him.

As soon as he had finished, he called a porter to his side.

"Vite!" he cried, in a tone of authority, to the man. "Un fiacre!"

And the porter called one.

I started to find that I knew what he meant. Till that moment, in my Second State, I had learned no French, and didn't know I could speak any. But I recognised the words quite well as soon as he uttered them. My lost knowledge reasserted itself.

They bundled on my boxes. The crowd still stood around and gaped at me, open-mouthed. I got into the cab, more dead than alive.

"Allez!" my policeman cried to the French-Canadian driver, seating himself by my side.

"A la gare du chemin de fer Pacific! Aussi vite que possible!"

I understood every word. This was wonderful. My memory was coming back again.

The man tore along the streets to the Pacific railway station. By the time we reached it we had distanced the sightseers, though some of them gave chase. My policeman got out.

"The train's just going!" he said sharply. "Don't take a ticket for Palmyra, if you don't want to be followed and tracked out all the way. They'll telegraph on your destination. Book to Kingston instead, and then change at Sharbot Lake, and take a second ticket on from there to Palmyra."

I listened, half dazed. Palmyra was the place where Dr. Ivor lived. Yet, even in the hurry of the moment, I wondered much to myself how the policeman knew I wanted to go to Palmyra.

There was no time to ask questions, however, or to deliberate on my plans. I took my ticket as desired, in a turmoil of feelings, and jumped on to the train. I trusted by this time I had eluded detection. I ought to have come, I saw now, under a feigned name. This horrid publicity was more than I could endure. My policeman helped me in with his persistent politeness, and saw my boxes checked as far as Sharbot Lake for me. Then he handed me the checks.

"Go in the Pullman," he said quietly. "It's a long journey, you know: four-and-twenty hours. You've only just caught it. But if you'd stopped in Quebec, you'd never have been able to give the sightseers the slip. You'd have been pestered all through. I think you're safe now. It was this or nothing."

"Oh, thank you so much!" I cried, with heartfelt gratitude, leaning out of the window as the train was on the point of starting. I pulled out my purse, and drew timidly forth a sovereign. "I've only English money," I said, hesitating, for I didn't know whether he'd be offended or not at the offer of a tip—he seemed such a perfect gentleman. "But if that's any use to you—"

He smiled a broad smile and shook his head, much amused.

"Oh, thank you," he said, half laughing, with a very curious air. "I'm a policeman, as I told you. But I don't need tips. I'm the Chief Constable of Quebec—there's my card; Major Tascherel,—and I'm glad to be of use, I'm sure, to any friend of Dr. Ivor's."

He lifted his hat with the inborn grace of a high-born gentleman. I coloured and bowed. The train steamed out of the station. As it went, I fell back, half fainting, in the comfortable armchair of the Pullman car, hardly able to speak with surprise and horror. It was all so strange, so puzzling, so bewildering! Then I owed my escape from the stenographic myrmidons of the Canadian Press to the polite care and attention of my father's murderer!

Major Tascherel was a friend, he said, of Dr. Ivor's!

Then Dr. Ivor knew I had come. He knew I was going to Palmyra to find him. And yet he had written to Quebec, apparently, expecting this crush, and asking his friend the Chief Constable to protect and befriend me. Had he murdered my father, and was he in love with me still? Did he think I'd come out, not to track him down, but to look for him? Strange, horrible questions! My heart stood still within me at this extraordinary revelation. Yet I was so frightened at the moment, alone in a strange land, that I felt almost grateful to the murderer himself for his kindness in thinking of me and providing for my reception.

As I settled in my seat and had time to realise what these things meant, it dawned upon me by degrees that all this was less remarkable, after all, than I first thought it. For they had telegraphed from England that I sailed on the Sarmatian; and Dr. Ivor, like everybody else, must have read the telegram. He might naturally conclude I would be half-mobbed by reporters; and as it was clear he had once been fond of me—hateful as I felt it even to admit the fact to myself—he might really have desired to save me annoyance and trouble. It was degrading, to be sure, even to think I owed anything of any sort to such a wretch as that murderer; yet in a certain corner of my heart I couldn't help being thankful to him. But how strange to feel I had come there on purpose to hunt him down! How horrible that I must so repay good with evil!

Then a still more ghastly thought surged up suddenly in my mind. Why on earth did he think I was going to Palmyra? Was it possible he fancied I loved him still—that I wanted to marry him? Could he imagine I'd come out just to fling myself at his feet and ask him to take me? Could he suppose I'd forgotten all the rest of my past life, and his vile act as well, and yet remembered alone what little love, if any, I ever had borne him? It was incredible that any man, however wicked, however conceited, should think such folly as that—that a girl would marry her father's murderer; and yet what might not one expect from a man who, after having shot my father, had still the inconceivable and unbelievable audacity to take deliberate steps for securing my own comfort and happiness? From such a wretch as that, one might look for almost anything!

For ten minutes or more, as we whirled along the line in the Pullman car, I was too dazed and confused to notice anything around me. My brain swam vaguely, filled full with wild whirling thoughts; the strange drama of my life, always teeming with mysteries, seemed to culminate in this reception in an unknown land by people who appeared almost to know more about my business than I myself did. I gazed out of the window blankly. In some vague dim way I saw we were passing between rocky hills, pine-clad and beautiful, with deep glimpses now and then into the riven gorge of a noble river. But I didn't even realise to myself that these were Canadian hills—those were the heights of Abraham—that was the silver St. Lawrence. It all passed by like a living dream. I sat still in my chair, as one stunned and faint; I gazed out, more dead than alive, on the unfamiliar scene that unrolled itself in exquisite panorama before me. Quebec and the Laurentian hills were to me half unreal: the inner senses alone were awake and conscious.

Presently a gentle voice at my side broke, not at all unpleasantly, the current of my reflections. It was a lady's voice, very sweet and musical.

"I'm afraid," it said kindly, with an air of tender solicitude, "you only just caught the train, and were hurried and worried and flurried at the last at the station. You look so white and tired. How your breath comes and goes! And I think you're new to our Canadian ways. I saw you didn't understand about the checks for the baggage. Let me take away this bag and put it up in the rack for you. Here's a footstool for your feet; that'll make you more comfortable."

At the first sound of her sweet voice, I turned to look at the speaker. She was a girl, perhaps a year or two younger than myself, very slender and graceful, and with eyes like a mother's. She wasn't exactly pretty, but her face was so full of intelligence and expression that it was worth a great deal more than any doll-like prettiness.

Perhaps it was pleasure at being spoken to kindly at all in this land of strangers; perhaps it was revulsion from the agony of shame and modesty I had endured at Quebec; but, at any rate, I felt drawn at first sight to my sweet-voiced fellow-traveller. Besides, she reminded me somewhat of Minnie Moore, and that resemblance alone was enough to attract me. I looked up at her gratefully.

"Oh, thank you so much!" I cried, putting my bag in her hand. "I've only just come out from England; and I'd hardly time at Quebec to catch the train; and the people crowded around so, that I was flustered at landing; and everything somehow seems to be going against me."

And with that my poor overwrought nerves gave way all at once, and without any more ado I just burst out crying.

The lady by my side leant over me tenderly.

"There—cry, dear," she said, as if she'd known me for years, stooping down and almost caressing me. "Jack,"—and she turned to a tall gentleman at her side,—"quick! you've got my black bag; get me out the sal volatile. She's quite faint, poor thing; we must look after her instantly."

The person to whom she spoke, and who was apparently her husband or her brother, took down the black bag from the rack hastily, and got out the sal volatile, as my friend directed him. He poured a little into a tumbler and held it quietly to my lips. I liked his manner, as I'd liked the lady's. He was so very brotherly. Besides, there was something extremely soothing about his quick, noiseless way. He did it all so fast, yet without the faintest sign of agitation. I couldn't help thinking what a good nurse he would make; he was so rapid and effective, yet so gentle and so quiet. He seemed perfectly accustomed to the ways of nervous women.

I dried my eyes after a while, and looked up in his face. He was very good-looking, and had a charming soft smile. How lucky I should have tumbled upon such pleasant travelling companions! In my present mental state, I had need of sympathy. And, indeed, they took as much care of me, and coddled me up as tenderly, as if they'd known me for years. I was almost tempted to make a clean breast of my personality to them, and tell them why it was I had been so worried and upset by my reception at Quebec: but I shrank from confessing it. I hated my own name, almost, it seemed to bring me such very unpleasant notoriety.

In a very few minutes, I felt quite at home with my new friends. I explained to them that when I landed I had no intention of going on West by train at once, but that news which I received on the way had compelled me to push forward by the very first chance; and that I had to change my ticket at a place called Sharbot Lake, whose very position or distance I hadn't had time to discover. The lady smiled sweetly, and calmed my fears by telling me we wouldn't reach Sharbot Lake till mid-day to-morrow, and that I would have plenty of time there to book on to my destination.

Thus encouraged, I went on to tell them I had no Canadian money, having brought out what I needed for travelling expenses and hotels in Bank of England 20 pound notes. The lady smiled again, and said in the friendliest way:

"Oh, my brother'll get them changed for you at Montreal as we pass, won't you, Jack? or at least as much as you need till you get to"—she checked herself—"the end of your journey."

I noticed how she pulled herself up, though at the moment I attached no particular importance to it.

So he was her brother, not her husband, then! Well, he was a very nice fellow, either way, and nobody could be kinder or more sympathetic than he'd been to me so far.

We fell into conversation, which soon by degrees grew quite intimate.

"How far West are you going?" the man she called Jack asked after a little time, tentatively.

And I answered, all unsuspiciously:

"To a place called Palmyra."

"Why, we live not far from Palmyra," the sister replied, with a smile. "We're going that way now. Our station's Adolphus Town, the very next village."

I hadn't yet learned to join the wisdom of the serpent to the innocence of the dove, I'm afraid. Remember, though in some ways I was a woman full grown, in others I was little more than a four- year-old baby.

"Do you know a Dr. Ivor there?" I asked eagerly, leaning forward.

"Oh, yes, quite well," the lady answered, arranging my footstool more comfortably as she spoke. "He's got a farm out there now, and hardly practises at all. How queer it is! One always finds one knows people in common. Is Dr. Ivor a friend of yours?"

I recoiled at the stray question almost as if I'd been shot.

"Oh, no!" I cried, horrified at the bare idea of such treason. "He's anything but a friend... I—I only wanted to know about him."

The lady looked at Jack, and Jack looked at the lady. Were they telegraphing signs? I fancied somehow they gave one another very meaning glances. Jack was the first to speak, breaking an awkward silence.

"You can't expect everyone to know your own friends, or to like them either, Elsie," he said slowly, with his eyes fixed hard on her, as if he expected her to flare up.

My heart misgave me. A hateful idea arose in it. Could my sweet travelling companion be engaged—to my father's murderer?

"But he's a dear good fellow, for all that, Jack," Elsie said stoutly; and strange as it sounds to say so, I admired her for sticking up for her friend Dr. Ivor, if she really liked him. "I won't hear him run down by anybody, not even by YOU. If this lady knew him better, I'm sure she'd like him, as we all do."

Jack turned the conversation abruptly.

"But if you're going to Palmyra," he asked, "where do you mean to stop? Have you thought about lodgings? You mustn't imagine it's a place like an English town, with an inn or hotel or good private apartments. There's nowhere you can put up at in these brand-new villages. Are you going to friends, or did you expect to find quarters as easily as in England?"

This was a difficulty which, indeed, had never even occurred to me till that moment. I stammered and hesitated.

"Well," I said slowly, "to tell you the truth, I haven't thought about that. The landing at Quebec was such a dreadful surprise to me, and"—tears came into my eyes again—"I had a great shock there—and I had to come on so quick, I didn't ask about anything but catching the train. I meant to stop a night or two either at Quebec or in Montreal, and to make all inquiries: but circumstances, you see, have prevented that. So I really don't know what I'd better do when I get to Palmyra."

"I do," my new friend answered quickly, her soft sweet voice having quite a decisive ring in it. "You'd better not go on to Palmyra at all. There's no sort of accommodation there, except a horrid drinking-saloon. You'd better stop short at Adolphus Town and spend the night with us; and then you can look about you next day, if you like, and see what chance there may be of finding decent quarters. Old Mrs. Wilkins might take her in, Jack, or the Blacks at the tannery."

I smiled, and felt touched.

"Oh, how good of you!" I cried. "But I really couldn't think of it. Thank you ever so much, though, for your kind thought, all the same. It's so good and sweet of you. But you don't even know who I am. I have no introduction."

"You're your own best introduction," Elsie said, with a pretty nod: I thought of her somehow from the very first moment I heard her name as Elsie. "And as to your not knowing us, never mind about that. We know YOU at first sight. It's the Canadian way to entertain Angels unawares. Out here, you know, hospitality's the rule of the country."

Well, I demurred for a long time; I fought off their invitation as well as I could: I couldn't bear thus to quarter myself upon utter strangers. But they both were so pressing, and brought up so many cogent arguments why I couldn't go alone to the one village saloon—a mere whisky-drinking public-house, they said, of very bad character,—that in the long run I was fain almost to acquiesce in their kind plan for my temporary housing. Besides, after my horrid experience at Quebec, it was such a positive relief to me to meet anybody nice and delicate, that I couldn't find it in my heart to refuse these dear people. And then, perhaps it was best not to go quite on to Palmyra at once, for fear of unexpectedly running against my father's murderer. If I met him in the street, and he recognised me and spoke to me, what on earth could I do? My head was all in a whirl, indeed, as to what he might intend or expect: for I felt sure he expected me. I made one last despairing effort.

"If I stop at your house, though," I said, half ashamed of myself for venturing to make conditions, "there's one promise you must make me—that I sha'n't see Dr. Ivor unless you let me know and get my consent beforehand."

Jack, as I called him to myself, answered gaily back with a rather curious smile:

"If you like, you need see nobody but our own two selves. We'll promise not to introduce anybody to you without due leave, and to let you do as you like in that and in everything."

So I yielded at last.

"Well, I must know your name," I said tentatively.

And Jack, looking queerly at me with an inquiring air, said:

"My sister's name's Elsie; mine's John Cheriton."

"And yours?" Elsie asked, glancing timidly down at me.

My heart beat hard. I was face to face with a dilemma. These were friends of Courtenay Ivor's, and I had given myself away to them. I was going to their house, to accept their hospitality—and to betray their friend! Never in my life did I feel so guilty before. Oh! what on earth was I to do? I had told them too much; I had gone to work foolishly. If I said my real name, I should let out my whole secret. I must brazen it out now. With tremulous lips and flushed cheek, I answered quickly, "Julia Marsden."

Elsie drew back, all abashed. In a moment her cheek grew still redder, I felt sure, than my own.

"Oh, Marsden!" she cried, eyeing me close. "Why, I thought you were Miss Callingham!"

"How on earth did you know that?" I exclaimed, terrified almost out of my life. Was I never for one moment to escape my own personality?

"Why, they put it in the papers that you were coming," Elsie answered, looking tenderly at me, more in sympathy than in anger. "And it's written on your bag, you know, that Jack put up in the rack there... That's why we were so sorry for you, and so grieved at the way you must have been hustled on the quay. And that's also why we wanted you to come to us... But don't be a bit afraid. We quite understand you want to travel incognita. After the sort of reception you got at Quebec, no wonder you're afraid of these hateful sightseers!... Very well, dear," she took my hand with the air of an old friend, "your disguise shall be respected while you stop at our house. Miss Marsden let it be. You can make any inquiries you like about Dr. Ivor. We will be secrecy itself. We'll say nothing to anyone. And my brother'll take your ticket at Sharbot Lake for Adolphus Town."