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.