otherwise than you imagine them to be.... Let sleeping dogs lie, my
dear. Without your aid, nothing more can be done. Don't trouble
yourself to put the blood-hounds on the track of some unhappy
creature who might otherwise escape. Don't rake it all up afresh.
Bury it--bury it--bury it!"

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."