“Ah! what harm indeed?” Jane echoed blandly.  “That’s what we often used to say among ourselves downstairs.  But Mr. Callingham, he was always that way, miss—­so strict and particular.  He said he’d forbidden you to say a word to anybody about that confounded country; and you must do as you were told.  He seemed to have a grudge against Australia, though it was there he made his money.  And he always would have his own way, your father would.”

While she spoke, I looked hard at the white head in the photograph.  Even as I did so, a thought occurred to me that had never occurred before.  Both in my mental Picture, and in looking at the photograph when I saw it first, the feeling that was uppermost in my mind was not sorrow, but horror.  I didn’t think with affection and regret and a deep sense of bereavement about my father’s murder.  The emotional accompaniment that had stamped itself upon the very fibre of my soul, was not pain but awe.  I think my main feeling was a feeling that a foul crime had taken place in the house, not a feeling that I had lost a very dear and near relative.  Rightly or wrongly, I drew from this the inference, which Jane’s gossip confirmed, that I had probably rather feared than loved my father.

It was strange to be reduced to such indirect evidence on such a point as that; but it was all I could get, and I had to be content with it.

Jane, leaning over my shoulder, looked hard at the photograph too.  I could see her eyes were fixed on the back of the man who was seen disappearing through the open window.  He was dressed like a gentleman, in knickerbockers and jacket, as far as one could judge; for the evening light rather blurred that part of the picture.  One hand was just waved, palm open, behind him.  Jane regarded it hard.  Then she gave an odd little start: 

“Why, just look at that hand!” she cried, with a tremor of surprise.  “Don’t you see what it is?  Don’t you think it’s a woman’s?”

I gazed back at her incredulously.

“Impossible,” I answered, shaking my head.  “It belongs as clear as day to the man you see in the photograph.  How on earth could his hand be a woman’s then, I’d like to know?  I can see the shirt-cuff.”

“Why, yes,” Jane answered, with simple common-sense:  “it’s dressed like a man, of course, and it’s a man to look at; but the hand’s a woman’s, as true as I’m standing here.  Why mightn’t a woman dress in a man’s suit on purpose?  And perhaps it was just because they were so sure it was a man as did it, that the police has gone wrong so long in trying to find the murderer.”

I looked hard at the hand myself.  Then I shut my eyes, and thought of the corresponding object in my mental Picture.  The result fairly staggered me.  The impression in each case was exactly the same.  It was a soft and delicate hand, very white and womanlike.  But was it really a woman’s?  I couldn’t feel quite sure in my own mind about that; but the very warning Jane gave me seemed to me a most useful one.  It would be well, after all, to keep one’s mind sedulously open to every possible explanation, and to take nothing for granted as to the murderer’s personality.