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But Miss Callingham's mind was completely unhinged for the present by the nervous shock she had received as her father fell dead before her. They must wait a few days till she recovered consciousness, and then they might confidently hope that the murderer would be identified, or at least so described that the police could track him. After that, I read the report of the coroner's inquest.
As they did so, a horrible sight met their astonished eyes. Mr. Callingham's dead body lay extended on the ground, shot right through the heart, and weltering in its life-blood. Miss Callingham stood by his side, transfixed with horror, and mute in her agony. On the floor lay the pistol that had fired the fatal shot.
Thornton, of Welbeck Street, who has visited her from time to time on behalf of the Treasury, in conjunction with Dr. Wade, her own medical attendant, went down to Barton-on-the-Sea on Monday, and once more examined Miss Callingham's intellect.
As good luck would have it, however, the clergyman at Wrode, who knew the Wilsons, happened to speak to me of the murder all England called it the murder and talked of nothing else for at least a fortnight, and in the course of conversation he mentioned this apparatus of Mr. Callingham's construction. 'What a pity, he said, 'there didn't happen to be one of them in the library at the time!
Miss Callingham's present state, they thought, might thus perhaps in part be accounted for. You can't imagine how curious it was for me to see myself thus impersonally discussed at such a distance of time, or to learn so long after that for ten days or more I had been the central object of interest to all reading England. My name was bandied about without the slightest reserve.
One morning, after I'd been four whole years at Aunt Emma's, I heard a ring at the bell, and, looking over the stairs, saw a tall and handsome man in a semi-military coat, who asked in a most audible voice for Miss Callingham. Maria, the housemaid, hesitated a moment. "Miss Callingham's in, sir," she answered in a somewhat dubious tone; "but I don't know whether I ought to let you see her or not.
At the end of a week he died, leaving on Jack's mind a profound conviction that all he had said was true, and that I was really Richard Wharton's daughter, not Vivian Callingham's. "For a week or two I made inquiries, Una," Jack said to me as we sat there, "inquiries which I won't detail to you in full just now, but which gradually showed me the truth of the poor soul's belief.
When Richard Wharton first learned of his wife's second marriage during his own lifetime to that wicked wretch who had ousted and supplanted him, he believed also, on the strength of Vivian Callingham's pretences, that his own daughter had died in her babyhood in Australia.
Callingham was the inventor of the acmegraphic process. The servants, said the telegram to the London papers, had heard the sound of a pistol-shot, about half-past eight at night, coming from the direction of Mr. Callingham's library. Aroused by the report, they rushed hastily to the spot, and broke open the door, which was locked from within.
Gradually, as we have informed our readers from time to time, Miss Callingham's intellect has become stronger and stronger; and though she is still totally unable to remember spontaneously any events that occurred before her father's death, it is hoped it may be possible, by describing vividly certain trains of previous incidents, to recall them in some small degree to her imperfect memory. Dr.
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