“On the way, the thought struck me that if I carried along the camera, all would be up with me should I happen to be challenged.  It was the only one of the sort in existence at the time, and the wires at the side would at once suffice to identify it and to arouse the suspicion even of an English policeman.  I paused for a moment behind a thick clump of lilacs and tried to pull out the incriminating negatives.  Oh, Una, I did it for your sake; but there, terrified and trembling, in hiding behind the bushes, and in danger of my life, with that still more unspeakable danger for yours haunting me always like a nightmare, can you wonder that for the moment I almost felt myself a murderer?  The very breezes in the trees made my heart give a jump, and then stand still within me.  I got out the first two or three plates with some trifling difficulty, for I didn’t understand the automatic apparatus then as I understand it now:  but the fourth stuck hard for a minute; the fifth broke in two; and the sixth—­well, the sixth plate baffled me entirely by getting jammed in the clockwork, and refusing to move, either backward or forward.

“At that moment, I either heard or fancied I heard a loud noise of pursuit, a hue and cry behind me.  Zeal for your safety had made me preternaturally nervous.  I looked about me hurriedly, thrust the negatives I’d recovered into my breast-pocket as fast as ever I could, flung the apparatus away from me with the sixth plate jammed hard in the groove, and made off at the top of my speed for the wall behind me.  For there, at that critical point, it occurred to me suddenly that the sixth and last flash of the machine had come and gone just as I stood poising myself on the ledge of the window-sill; and I thought to myself—­rightly as it turned out—­this additional evidence would only strengthen the belief in the public mind that Mr. Callingham had been murdered by the man whom the servants saw escaping from the window.

“The rest, my child, you know pretty well already.  In a panic on your account, I scrambled over the wall, tearing my hands as I went with that nasty-bottle glass, reached my bicycle outside, and made off, not for the country, but for the inn where they were holding the coroner’s inquest.  My left hand I had to hold, tied up in my handkerchief to stop the bleeding, in the pocket of my jacket:  but I thought this the best way, all the same, to escape detection.  And, indeed, instead of being, as I feared, the only man there in bicycling dress and knickerbockers, I found the occasion had positively attracted all the cyclists of the neighbourhood.  Each man went there to show his own innocence of fear or suspicion.  A good dozen or two of bicyclists stood gathered already in the body of the room in the same incriminating costume.  So I found safety in numbers.  Even the servants who had seen me disappear through the window, though their eyes lighted upon me more than once, never for a moment seemed to suspect me.  And I know very well why.  When I stand up, I’m the straightest and most perpendicular man that ever walked erect.  But when I poise to jump, I bend my spine so much that I produce the impression of being almost hump-backed.  It was that attitude you recognised in me when I jumped from the window just now.”