thus perhaps in part be accounted for.

You can't imagine how curious it was for me to see myself thus
impersonally discussed at such a distance of time, or to learn so
long after that for ten days or more I had been the central object
of interest to all reading England. My name was bandied about
without the slightest reserve. I trembled to see how cavalierly the
press had treated me.

As I went on, I began to learn more and more about my father. He had
made money in Australia, it was said, and had come to live at
Woodbury some fourteen years earlier, where my mother had died when
I was a child of four; and some accounts said she was a widow of
fortune. My father had been interested in chemistry and photography,
it seemed, and had lately completed a new invention, the acmegraph,
for taking successive photographs at measured intervals of so many
seconds by electric light. He was a grave, stern man, the papers
said, more feared than loved by his servants and neighbours; but
nobody about was known to have a personal grudge against him. On the
contrary, he lived at peace with all men. The motive for the murder
remained to the end a complete mystery.

On the second morning of the inquest, however, a curious thing
happened. The police, it appeared, had sealed up the room where the
murder took place, and allowed nobody to enter it till the inquiry
was over. But after the jury came round to view the room, the
policeman in charge found the window at the back of the house had
been recently opened, and the box with the photographic apparatus
had been stolen from the library. Till that moment nobody had
attached any importance to the presence of this camera. It hadn't