“I do remember!  I slept soundly.”

He dropped my arm as suddenly as he had taken it—­and looked at me with the air of a man whose mind was relieved of the last doubt that rested on it.

“This is a marked day in your life, and in mine,” he said, gravely.  “I am absolutely certain, Mr. Blake, of one thing—­I have got what Mr. Candy wanted to say to you this morning, in the notes that I took at my patient’s bedside.  Wait! that is not all.  I am firmly persuaded that I can prove you to have been unconscious of what you were about, when you entered the room and took the Diamond.  Give me time to think, and time to question you.  I believe the vindication of your innocence is in my hands!”

“Explain yourself, for God’s sake!  What do you mean?”

In the excitement of our colloquy, we had walked on a few steps, beyond the clump of dwarf trees which had hitherto screened us from view.  Before Ezra Jennings could answer me, he was hailed from the high road by a man, in great agitation, who had been evidently on the look-out for him.

“I am coming,” he called back; “I am coming as fast as I can!” He turned to me.  “There is an urgent case waiting for me at the village yonder; I ought to have been there half an hour since—­I must attend to it at once.  Give me two hours from this time, and call at Mr. Candy’s again—­and I will engage to be ready for you.”

“How am I to wait!” I exclaimed, impatiently.  “Can’t you quiet my mind by a word of explanation before we part?”

“This is far too serious a matter to be explained in a hurry, Mr. Blake.  I am not wilfully trying your patience—­I should only be adding to your suspense, if I attempted to relieve it as things are now.  At Frizinghall, sir, in two hours’ time!”

The man on the high road hailed him again.  He hurried away, and left me.

CHAPTER X

How the interval of suspense in which I was now condemned might have affected other men in my position, I cannot pretend to say.  The influence of the two hours’ probation upon my temperament was simply this.  I felt physically incapable of remaining still in any one place, and morally incapable of speaking to any one human being, until I had first heard all that Ezra Jennings had to say to me.

In this frame of mind, I not only abandoned my contemplated visit to Mrs. Ablewhite—­I even shrank from encountering Gabriel Betteredge himself.

Returning to Frizinghall, I left a note for Betteredge, telling him that I had been unexpectedly called away for a few hours, but that he might certainly expect me to return towards three o’clock in the afternoon.  I requested him, in the interval, to order his dinner at the usual hour, and to amuse himself as he pleased.  He had, as I well knew, hosts of friends in Frizinghall; and he would be at no loss how to fill up his time until I returned to the hotel.