When he rose, late in the morning, unrefreshed and tired, he did connect the nightmare with something intelligible. It arose from the book and its story; which, like Chaucer’s, was left half told. That, in itself, would have mattered little. A strange thing happened: it began with this morning: there fell upon him quite suddenly an irresistible sense that here was a duty laid upon him: a duty not to be neglected: a thing that had to be done to the exclusion of everything else. He had to follow up this story, and to recover, after seventy years and more, the true history of the crime which cast a shadow so long and so terrible upon all those years and the children of those years. He looked at the papers on his table: they were the half-finished article he had undertaken: his mind bidden to think upon the subject rebelled: it refused to work: it would not be turned in that direction: it went off to Campaigne Park and to seventy years before. Without words Leonard was mysteriously commanded to follow up the story to its proper conclusion. Without any words he was plainly and unmistakably commanded to follow it up. By whom? He did not ask. He obeyed. After seventy years the discovery of the guilty man would seem difficult. We find historians grappling with the cases of accused persons, and forming conclusions absolutely opposite, even when the evidence seems quite full and circumstantial in every point. Take the case of Anne Boleyn, for instance; or that of Mary Queen of Scots: two of the most illustrious and most unfortunate princesses. What agreement is there among historians concerning these ladies? Yet there are monumental masses of documents--contemporary, voluminous, official, private, epistolary, confidential, partisan--that exist to help them. In this case there were no other documents except those in the Book of Cuttings. All that a private investigation could do was to read the evidence that had already been submitted to two Courts, and to arrive, if possible, at some conclusion. This Leonard proceeded to do. He laid aside altogether the work on which he had been engaged, he placed the book before him, and he read the whole contents again, word for word, albeit with the same strange shrinking. Then he made notes. The first referred to the man Dunning. I. _John Dunning._--The prisoner was rightly acquitted; he was most certainly innocent. The boy showed that he had not been in the wood more than two or three minutes. The deceased was a man six inches taller than Dunning, and strong in proportion. The latter could only have delivered the fatal blow if he had come upon his victim from behind, and while he was sitting. But the medical evidence proves that the blow must have been delivered from the front; and it was also proved that the grass was too wet from recent showers for the deceased to have been sitting down on it.