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.
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