“No, dear,” I said, soothing her cheek; “I shall go alone.  I shall try what I can discover and remember myself without any suggestion or explanation from others.  I want to find out how things really stand.  I shall set to work on my own account to unravel this mystery.”

“But how can you manage things by yourself?” Aunt Emma exclaimed, wringing her hands despondently.  “A girl of your age! without even a maid! and all alone in the world!  I shall be afraid to let you go.  Dr. Wade won’t allow it.”

I drew myself up very straight, and realised the position.

“Aunt Emma,” I said plainly, in a decided voice, “I’m a full-grown woman, over twenty-one years of age, mistress of my own acts, and no longer a ward of yours.  I can do as I like, and neither Dr. Wade nor anybody else can prevent me.  He may advice me not to go:  he has no power to order me.  I’m my father’s heiress, and a person of independent means.  I’ve been a cipher too long.  From to-day I take my affairs wholly into my own hands.  I ’ll go round at once and see your lawyer, your banker, your agent, your tradesmen, and tell them that henceforth I draw my own rents, I receive my own dividends, I pay my own bills, I keep my own banking account.  And to-morrow or the next day I set out for Woodbury.”

The Inspector turned to Aunt Emma with a demonstrative smile.

“There, you see for. yourself,” he said, well pleased, “what this interview has done for her!”

But Aunt Emma only drew back, wrung her hands again in impotent despair, and stared at him blankly like a wounded creature.

The Inspector took up his hat to leave.  I followed him out to the door, and shook hands with him cordially.  The burden felt lighter on my shoulders already.  For four long years that mystery had haunted me day and night, as a thing impenetrable, incomprehensible, not even to be inquired about.  The mere sense that I might now begin to ask what it meant seemed to make it immediately less awful and less burdensome to me.

When I returned to the drawing-room, Aunt Emma sat there on the sofa, crying silently, the very picture of misery.

“Una,” she said, without even raising her eyes to mine, “the man may have done as he says:  he may have restored you your mind again; but what’s that to me?  He’s lost me my child, my darling, my daughter!”

I stooped down and kissed her.  Dear, tender-hearted auntie! she had always been very good to me.  But I knew I was right, for all that, in becoming a woman,—­in asserting my years, my independence, my freedom, my duty.  To have shirked it any longer would have been sheer cowardice.  So I just kissed her silently, and went up to my own room—­to put on my brown hat, and go out to the banker’s.

From that moment forth, one fierce desire in life alone possessed me.  The brooding mystery that enveloped my life ceased to be passive, and became an active goad, as it were, to push me forward incessantly on my search for the runaway I was the creature of a fixed idea.  A fiery energy spurred me on all my time.  I was determined now to find out my father’s murderer.  I was determined to shake off the atmosphere of doubt and forgetfulness.  I was determined to recall those first scenes of my life that so eluded my memory.