Aunt Emma shook all over, visibly to the naked eye.
“You’ll have a relapse, my child!” she exclaimed, half crying, and clinging to me in her terror. “You’ll forget all you’ve learned: you’ll go back these four years again!—Leave my house at once, sir! You should never have entered it!”
I stood between them like a statue.
“No, stop here a little longer,” I said, waving my hand towards him imperiously. “I haven’t yet heard all it’s right for me to hear.... Auntie, you mistake. I’m a woman at last. I see what everything means. I’m beginning to remember again. For four years that hateful Picture has haunted me night and day. I could never shut my eyes for a minute without seeing it. I’ve longed to know what it all meant; but whenever I’ve asked, I’ve been repressed like a baby. I’m a baby no longer: I feel myself a woman. What the Inspector here has told me already, half opens my eyes: I must have them opened altogether now. I can’t stop at this point. I’m going back to Woodbury.”
Aunt Emma clung to me still harder in a perfect agony of passionate terror.
“To Woodbury, my darling!” she cried. “Going back! Oh, Una, it’ll kill you!”
“I think not,” the Inspector answered, with a very quiet smile. “Miss Callingham has recovered, I venture to say, far more profoundly than you imagine. This repression, our medical adviser tells us, has been bad for her. If she’s allowed to visit freely the places connected with her earlier life, it may all return again to her; and the ends of Justice may thus at last be served for us. I notice already one hopeful symptom: Miss Callingham speaks of going back to Woodbury.”
Aunt Emma looked up at him, horrified. All her firmness was gone now.
“It’s YOU who’ve put this into her head!” she exclaimed, in a ferment of horror. “She’d never thought of it herself. You’ve made her do it!”
“On the contrary, auntie,” I answered, feeling my ground grow surer under me every moment as I spoke, “this gentleman has never even by the merest hint suggested such an idea to my mind. It occurred to me quite spontaneously. I MUST find out now who was my father’s murderer! All the Inspector has told me seems to arouse in my brain some vague, forgotten chords. It brings back to me faint shadows. I feel sure if I went to Woodbury I should remember much more. And then, you must see for yourself, there’s another reason, dear, that ought to make me go. Nobody but I ever saw the murderer’s face. It’s a duty imposed upon me from without, as it were, never to rest again in peace till I’ve recognised him.”