Overcome by the horror of this unexpected revelation, the chairman covered his face with his hand, and for a moment or two remained silent.

“Miserable man,” he said at length, “you have betrayed yourself.”

“You bade me confess!  You urged me to throw myself upon the mercy of the board!”

“You have confessed to a crime which no one suspected you of having committed,” replied the chairman, “and which this board has no power either to punish or forgive.  All that I can do for you is to advise you to submit to the law, to plead guilty, and to conceal nothing.  When did you do this deed?”

The guilty man rose to his feet, and leaned heavily against the table.  His answer came reluctantly, like the speech of one dreaming.

“On the twenty-second of September!”

On the twenty-second of September!  I looked in Jonathan Jelf’s face, and he in mine.  I felt my own paling with a strange sense of wonder and dread.  I saw his blanch suddenly, even to the lips.

“Merciful heaven!” he whispered, “what was it, then, that you saw in the train?”

* * * * *

What was it that I saw in the train?  That question remains unanswered to this day.  I have never been able to reply to it.  I only know that it bore the living likeness of the murdered man, whose body had then been lying some ten weeks under a rough pile of branches, and brambles, and rotting leaves, at the bottom of a deserted chalk-pit about half-way between Blackwater and Mallingford.  I know that it spoke, and moved, and looked as that man spoke, and moved, and looked in life; that I heard, or seemed to hear, things related which I could never otherwise have learned; that I was guided, as it were, by that vision on the platform to the identification of the murderer; and that, a passive instrument myself, I was destined, by means of these mysterious teachings, to bring about the ends of justice.  For these things I have never been able to account.

As for that matter of the cigar-case, it proved on inquiry, that the carriage in which I travelled down that afternoon to Clayborough had not been in use for several weeks, and was in point of fact the same in which poor John Dwerrihouse had performed his last journey.  The case had, doubtless, been dropped by him, and had lain unnoticed till I found it.

Upon the details of the murder I have no need to dwell.  Those who desire more ample particulars may find them, and the written confession of Augustus Raikes, in the files of the Times for 1856.  Enough that the under-secretary, knowing the history of the new line, and following the negotiation step by step through all its stages, determined to waylay Mr. Dwerrihouse, rob him of the seventy-five thousand pounds, and escape to America with his booty.