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Till that moment, I thought of them only as some result of your too suddenly turning off the electric current. But then, it came home to me in a second that Mr. Callingham must have set out his apparatus all ready for experimenting that the electric apparatus was there to put it in working order.
And pray, sir, what do you want here this evening?" "Go on!" Jack cried, intensely relieved, I could feel. "Let me see how much more you can remember, Una." "So you shut the door softly and said: "'Yes, it's I, Mr. Callingham," I continued all aglow, and looking into his eyes for confirmation. "'And I've come to tell you a fact that may surprise you. Prepare for strange news.
"That's her half-sister," he said, "Una Callingham your wife's child by her second marriage. She may be like her, no doubt, as half-sisters often are. But Mary Wharton, I know, died some eighteen years ago or so, when Una was quite a baby, I believe. I've heard all about it, because, don't you see, I'm engaged to Una."
Callingham saw that if your mother died, and you lived and married, he himself would be deprived of the fortune for which he had so wickedly plotted. So he made up another plot even more extraordinary and more diabolical still than the first. He decided to pretend it was Mary Wharton that died, and to palm you off on the world as his own child, Una Callingham.
"To Woodbury, my darling!" she cried. "Going back! Oh, Una, it'll kill you!" "I think not," the Inspector answered, with a very quiet smile. "Miss Callingham has recovered, I venture to say, far more profoundly than you imagine. This repression, our medical adviser tells us, has been bad for her.
I wanted to marry you; and therefore, as far as was consistent with justice and honour, I wished to spare your supposed father a complete exposure." "But why didn't you tell the police?" I asked. "Because I had really nothing definite in any way to go upon. Realise the position to yourself, and you'll see how difficult it was for me. Mr. Callingham suspected I was paying you attentions.
Minnie looked at me, smiling. She thought I was asking for a very different reason. "Yes, that's him, right enough, dear," she said. "I could tell him among a thousand. Why, the Moore hand alone would be quite enough to know him by. It's just like my own. We've all of us got it except yourself. I always said you weren't one of us. You're a regular born Callingham." I gazed at her fixedly.
I'm an officer from Scotland Yard, and I want to see Miss Callingham alone most particularly." Maria drew herself up and paused. My heart stood still within me at this chance of enlightenment. I guessed what he meant; so I called over the stairs to her, in a tremor of excitement: "Show the gentleman into the drawing-room, Maria. I 'll come down to him at once."
I cried; "it's so much nicer and more natural.... But how did you come to know my name was Una at all?" For she slipped it out as glibly as if she'd always called me so. "Why, everybody knows that." Elsie answered, amused. "The whole world speaks of you always as Una Callingham. You forget you're a celebrity. Doctors have read memoirs about you at Medical Congresses.
There, with horrified eyes, I read this hateful paragraph, in the atrociously vulgar style of Transatlantic journalism: "The Sarmatian, expected off Belleisle to-morrow morning, brings among her passengers, as we learn by telegram, the famous Una Callingham, whose connection with the so-called Woodbury Mystery is now a matter of historical interest.
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