sight; and in the background, half blurred by the summer evening light, it showed the vague outline of a man’s back, getting out of the window.  On one side was the door:  that formed no part of my mental picture, because it was at my back; but in the photograph it too was indistinct, as if in the very act of being burst open.  The details were vague, in part—­probably the picture had never been properly focussed;—­but the main figures stood out with perfect clearness, and everything in the room was, allowing for the changed point of view, exactly as I remembered it in my persistent mental photograph.

I drew a deep breath.

“That’s my Picture,” I said, slowly.  “But it recalls to me nothing new.  I—­I don’t understand it.”

The Inspector stared at me hard once more.

“Do you know,” he asked, “how that photograph was produced, and how it came into our possession?”

I trembled violently.

“No, I don’t,” I answered, reddening.  “But—­I think it had something to do with the flash like lightning.”

The Inspector jumped at those words like a cat upon a mouse.

“Quite right,” he cried briskly, as one who at last, after long search, finds a hopeful clue where all seemed hopeless.  “It had to do with the flash.  The flash produced it.  This is a photograph taken by your father’s process....  Of course you recollect your father’s process?”

He eyed me close.  The words, as he spoke them, seemed to call up dimly some faint memory of my pre-natal days—­of my First State, as I had learned from the doctors to call it.  But his scrutiny made me shrink.  I shut my eyes and looked back.

“I think,” I said slowly, rummaging my memory half in vain, “I remember something about it.  It had something to do with photography, hadn’t it?...No, no, with the electric light....I can’t exactly remember which.  Will you tell me all about it?”

He leaned back in his chair, and, eyeing me all the time with that same watchful glance, began to describe to me in some detail an apparatus which he said my father had devised, for taking instantaneous photographs by the electric light, with a clockwork mechanism.  It was an apparatus that let sensitive-plates revolve one after another opposite the lens of a camera; and as each was exposed, the clockwork that moved it produced an electric spark, so as to represent such a series of effects as the successive positions of a horse in trotting.  My father, it seemed, was of a scientific turn, and had just perfected this new automatic machine before his sudden death.  I listened with breathless interest; for up to that time I had never been allowed to hear anything about my father—­anything about the great tragedy with which my second life began.  It was wonderful to me even now to be allowed to speak and ask questions on it with anybody.  So hedged about had I been all my days with mystery.

As I listened, I saw the Inspector could tell by the answering flash in my eye that his words recalled something to me, however vaguely.  As he finished, I leant forward, and with a very flushed face, that I could feel myself, I cried, in a burst of recollection: