Yet, strange to say, it was rather a burning curiosity and a deep sense of duty that urged me on, than anything I could properly call affection—­still less, revenge or malice.  I didn’t remember my father as alive at all:  the one thing I could recollect about him was the ghastly look of that dead body, stretched at full length on the library floor, with its white beard all dabbled in the red blood that clotted it.  It was abstract zeal for the discovery of the truth that alone pushed me on.  This search became to me henceforth an end and aim in itself.  It stood out, as it were, visibly in the imperative mood:  “go here;” “go there;” “do this;” “try that;” “leave no stone unturned anywhere till you’ve tracked down the murderer!” Those were the voices that now incessantly though inaudibly pursued me.

Next day I spent in preparations for my departure.  I would hunt up Woodbury now, though fifty Aunt Emma’s held their gentle old faces up in solemn warning against me.  The day after that again, I set out on my task.  The pull was hard.  I had taken my own affairs entirely into my own hands by that time, and had provided myself with money for a long stay at Woodbury.  But it was the very first railway journey I could ever remember to have made alone; and I confess, when I found myself seated all by myself in a first-class carriage, with no friend beside me, my resolution for a moment almost broke down again.  It was so terrible to feel oneself boxed up there for an hour or two alone, with that awful Picture staring one in the face all the time from every fence and field and wall and hoarding.  It obliterated Fry’s Cocoa; it fixed itself on the yellow face of Colman’s Mustard.

I went by Liverpool Street, and drove across to Paddington.  I had never, to my knowledge, been in London before:  and it was all so new to me.  But Liverpool Street was even newer to me than Paddington, I noticed.  A faint sense of familiarity seemed to hang about the Great Western line.  And that was not surprising, I thought, as I turned it over; for, of course, in the old days, when we lived at Woodbury, I must often have come down from town that way with my father.  Yet I remembered nothing of it all definitely; the most I could say was that I seemed dimly to recollect having been there before—­though when or where or how, I hadn’t the faintest notion.

I was early at Paddington.  The refreshment room somehow failed to attract me.  I walked up and down the platform, waiting for my train.  As I did so, a boy pasted a poster on a board:  it was the contents-sheet of one of the baser little Society papers.  Something strange in it caught my eye.  I looked again in amazement.  Oh, great heavens! what was this in big flaring letters?

“Miss Una Callingham and the Woodbury mystery!  Is she screening the murderer?  A possible explanation!”