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