“Did I love you then, Jack?” I whispered, nestling still closer to him, in spite of my horror.  Or rather, my very horror made me feel more acutely than ever the need for protection.  I was no longer alone in the world.  I had a man to support me.

“You told me so, darling,” he answered, smoothing my hair with his hand.  “Have you forgotten all about it?  Doesn’t even that come back?  Can’t you remember it now, when I’ve told you who I am and how it all happened?”

I shook my head.

“All cloudy still,” I replied, vaguely.  “Some dim sense of familiarity, perhaps,—­as when people say they have a feeling of having lived all this over somewhere else before,—­but nothing more certain, nothing more definite.”

“Then I must begin at the beginning,” Jack answered, bracing himself for his hard task, “and reconstruct your whole life for you, as far as I know it, from your very childhood.  I’m particularly anxious you should not merely be told what took place, but should remember the past.  There are gaps in my own knowledge I want you to eke out.  There are places I want you to help me myself over.  And besides, it’ll be more satisfactory to yourself to remember than to be told it.”

I leaned back, almost exhausted.  Incredible as it may seem to you, in spite of that awful photograph, I couldn’t really believe even so I had killed my father.  And yet I knew very well now that Jack, at least, hadn’t done it.  That was almost enough.  But not quite.  My head swam round in terror.  I waited and longed for Jack to explain the whole thing to me.

“You remember,” he said, watching me close, “that when you lived as a very little girl in Australia you had a papa who seems different to you still from the papa in your later childish memories?”

“I remember it very well,” I replied.  “It came back to me on the Sarmatian.  I think of him always now as the papa in the loose white linen coat.  The more I dwell on him, the more does he come out to me as a different man from the other one—­the father...I shot at The Grange, at Woodbury.  The father that lives with me in that ineffaceable Picture.”

“He was a different man,” Jack answered, with a sudden burst, as if he knew all my story.  “Una, I may as well relieve your mind all at once on that formidable point.  You shot that man”—­he pointed to the white-bearded person in the photograph,—­“but it was not parricide:  it was not even murder.  It was under grave provocation...in more than self-defence...and he was not your father.”

“Not my father!” I cried, clasping my hands and leaning forward in my profound suspense.  “But I killed him all the same!  Oh, Jack, how terrible!”

“You must quiet yourself, my child,” he said, still soothing me automatically.  “I want your aid in this matter.  You must listen to me calmly, and bring your mind to bear on all I say to you.”