Jane looked at it long and slowly, with tears in her eyes.  Then she said at last, after a deep pause, in a very hushed voice: 

“Why, how did you get this?  It wasn’t put in the papers.”

“No,” I answered quietly, “it wasn’t put in the papers.  For reasons of their own, the police kept it unpublished.”

Jane gazed at the proof still closer.  “They oughtn’t to have done that,” she said.

“They ought to have sent it out everywhere broadcast—­so that anybody who knew the man could tell him by his back.”

That seemed to me such obvious good sense that I wondered to myself the police hadn’t thought long since of it; but I supposed they had some good ground of their own for holding it all this time in their own possession.

Jane went on talking to me still for many minutes about the scene: 

“Ah, yes; that was just how he lay, poor dear gentleman!  And the book on the chair, too!  Well, did you ever in your life see anything so like!  And to think it was taken all by itself, as one might say, by magic.  But there! your poor papa was a wonderful clever man.  Such things as he used to invent!  Such ideas and such machines!  We were sorry for him, though we always thought, to be sure, he was dreadful severe with you, Miss Una.  Such a gentleman to have his own way, too —­so cold and reserved like.  But one mustn’t talk nothing but good about the dead, they say.  And if he was a bit hard, he was more than hard treated for it in the end, poor gentleman!”

It interested me to get these half side-lights on my father’s character.  Knowing nothing of him, as I did, save the solitary fact that he was the white-haired gentleman I saw dead in my Picture, I naturally wanted to learn as much as I could from this old servant of ours as to the family conditions.

“Then you thought him harsh, in the servants’-hall?” I said tentatively to Jane.  “You thought him hard and unbending?”

“Well, there, Miss,” Jane ran on, putting a cushion to my back tenderly—­it was strange to be the recipient of so much delicate attention from a perfect stranger,—­“not exactly what you’d call harsh to us ourselves, you know:  he was a good master enough, as long as one did what was ordered, though he was a little bit fidgetty.  But to you, we all thought he was always rather hard.  People said so in Woodbury.  And yet, in a way, I don’t know how it was, he always seemed more’n half afraid of you.  He was careful about your health, and spoiled and petted you for that; yet he was always pulling you up, you know, and looking after what you did:  and for one thing, I remember, there’s many a time you were sent to bed when you were a good big girl for nothing on earth else but because he heard you talking to us in the hall about Australia.”

“Talking to you about Australia!” I cried, pricking my ears.  “Why, what harm was there in that?  Why on earth didn’t he want me to talk about Australia?”