CHAPTER XXII. — MY MEMORY RETURNS
“At last my chance came,” Jack went on. “I’d found out almost everything; not, of course, exactly by way of legal proof, but to my own entire satisfaction: and I determined to lay the matter definitely at once before Mr. Callingham. So I took a holiday for a fortnight, to go bicycling in the Midlands I told my patients; and I fixed my head-quarters at Wrode, which, as you probably remember, is twenty miles off from Woodbury.
“It was important for my scheme I should catch Mr. Callingham alone. I had no idea of entrapping him. I wanted to work upon his conscience and induce him to confess. My object was rather to move him to remorse and restitution than to terrify or surprise him.
“So on the day of the accident—call it murder, if you will—I rode over on my machine, unannounced, to The Grange to see him. You knew where I was staying, you recollect—”
At the words, a burst of memory came suddenly over me.
“Oh yes!” I cried. “I remember. It was at the Wilsons’, at Wrode. I wrote over there to tell you we were going to dine alone at six that evening, as papa had got his electric apparatus home from his instrument-maker, and was anxious to try his experiments early. You’d written to me privately—a boy brought the note—that you wanted to have an hour’s talk alone with papa. I thought it was about ME, and I was, oh, ever so nervous!”
For it all came back to me now, as clear as yesterday.
Jack looked at me hard.