indeed of Jack, and determined at all costs, sooner or later, to
marry him. But though I had kept all quiet, papa had suspected my
liking on the day of the Berry Pomeroy athletics, and had forbidden
me to see Jack, or to write to him, or to have anything further to
say to him. He was determined, he told me, whoever I married, I
shouldn't at least marry a beggarly doctor. All that I remembered;
and also how, in spite of the prohibition, I wrote letters to Jack,
but could receive none in return--lest my father should see them.

And still, the central mystery of the murder was no nearer solution.
I held my breath in terror. Had I really any sort of justification
in killing him?

Dimly and instinctively, as Jack went on, a faint sense of
resentment and righteous indignation against the man with the white
beard rose up vaguely in my mind by slow degrees. I knew I had been
angry with him, I knew I had defied him, but how or why as yet I
knew not.

Then Jack suddenly paused, and began in a different voice a new part
of his tale. It was nothing I remembered or could possibly remember,
he said; but it was necessary to the comprehension of what came
after, and would help me to recall it. About a week after I left
Torquay, it seemed, Jack was in his consulting-room at Babbicombe
one day, having just returned from a very long bicycle ride--for he
was a first-rate cyclist,--when the servant announced a new
patient; and a very worn-out old man came in to visit him.

The man had a ragged grey beard and scanty white hair; he was clad
in poor clothes, and had tramped on foot all the way from London to