Well, I ran into my own room as quick as quick could be, and set my front hair straight, and slipped on a hat and jacket (for I was in my morning dress), and then went down to the drawing-room to see the Inspector.
He rose as I entered. He was a gentleman, I felt at once. His manner was as deferential, as kind, and as considerate to my sensitiveness, as anything it’s possible for you to imagine in anyone.
“I’m sorry to have to trouble you, Miss Callingham,” he said, with a very gentle smile; “but I daresay you can understand yourself the object of my visit. I could have wished to come in a more authorised way; but I’ve been in correspondence with Miss Moore for some time past as to the desirability of reopening the inquiry with regard to your father’s unfortunate death; and I thought the time might now have arrived when it would be possible to put a few questions to you personally upon that unhappy subject. Miss Moore objected to my plan. She thought it would still perhaps be prejudicial to your health—a point in which Dr. Wade, I must say, entirely agrees with her. Nevertheless, in the interests of Justice, as the murderer is still at large, I’ve ventured to ask you for this interview; because what I read in the newspapers about the state of your health—.”
I interrupted him, astonished.
“What you read in the newspapers about the state of my health!” I repeated, thunderstruck. “Why, surely they don’t put the state of MY health in the newspapers!”
For I didn’t know then I was a Psychological Phenomenon.
The Inspector smiled blandly, and pulling out his pocket-book, selected a cutting from a pile that apparently all referred to me.
“You’re mistaken,” he said, briefly. “The newspapers, on the contrary, have treated your case at great length. See, here’s the latest report. That’s clipped from last Wednesday’s Telegraph.”
I remembered then that a paragraph of just that size had been carefully cut out of Wednesday’s paper before I was allowed by Aunt Emma to read it. Aunt Emma always glanced over the paper first, indeed, and often cut out such offending paragraphs. But I never attached much importance to their absence before, because I thought it was merely a little fussy result of auntie’s good old English sense of maidenly modesty. I supposed she merely meant to spare my blushes. I knew girls were often prevented on particular days from reading the papers.
But now I seized the paragraph he handed me, and read it with deep interest. It was the very first time I had seen my own name in a printed newspaper. I didn’t know then how often it had figured there.