And still, the central mystery of the murder was no nearer solution.  I held my breath in terror.  Had I really any sort of justification in killing him?

Dimly and instinctively, as Jack went on, a faint sense of resentment and righteous indignation against the man with the white beard rose up vaguely in my mind by slow degrees.  I knew I had been angry with him, I knew I had defied him, but how or why as yet I knew not.

Then Jack suddenly paused, and began in a different voice a new part of his tale.  It was nothing I remembered or could possibly remember, he said; but it was necessary to the comprehension of what came after, and would help me to recall it.  About a week after I left Torquay, it seemed, Jack was in his consulting-room at Babbicombe one day, having just returned from a very long bicycle ride—­for he was a first-rate cyclist,—­when the servant announced a new patient; and a very worn-out old man came in to visit him.

The man had a ragged grey beard and scanty white hair; he was clad in poor clothes, and had tramped on foot all the way from London to Babbicombe, where Jack used to practice.  But Jack saw at once under this rough exterior he had the voice and address of a cultivated gentleman, though he was so broken down by want and long suffering and exposure and illness that he looked like a beggar just let loose from the workhouse.

I held my breath as Jack showed me the poor old man’s photograph.  It was a portrait taken after death—­for Jack attended him to the end through a fatal illness;—­and it showed a face thin and worn, and much lined by unspeakable hardships.  But I burst out crying at once the very moment I looked at it.  For a second or two, I couldn’t say why:  I suppose it was instinct.  Blood is thicker than water, they tell us; and I have the intuition of kindred very strong in me, I believe.  But at any rate, I cried silently, with big hot tears, while I looked at that dead face of silent suffering, as I never had cried over the photograph of the respectable-looking man who lay dead on the floor of the library, and whom I was always taught to consider my father.  Then it came back to me, why...  I gazed at it and grew faint.  I clutched Jack’s arm for support.  I knew what it meant now.  The poor worn old man who lay dead on the bed with that look of mute agony on his features—­was my first papa:  the papa in the loose white linen coat:  the one I remembered with childlike love and trustfulness in my earliest babyish Australian recollections!

I couldn’t mistake the face.  It was burnt into my brain now.  This was he, though much older and sadder, and more scarred and lined by age and weather.  It was my very first papa.  My own papa.  I cried silently still.  I couldn’t bear to look at it.  Then the real truth broke upon me once more.  This, and this alone, was in very deed my one real father!

I seized the faded photograph and pressed it to my lips.