testimony of others, I learnt to call him so. But his relationship
wasn't part of the Picture to me. There, he was only in my eyes a
man--a man well past middle age, with a long white beard, now
dabbled with the thick blood that kept gurgling so hatefully from
the red spot in his waistcoat. He lay on his back, half-curled round
toward one arm, exactly as he fell. And the revolver he had been
shot with lay on the ground not far from him.

But that wasn't all the Picture. The murderer was there as well as
the victim. Besides the table, and the box, and the wounded man, and
the pistol, I saw another figure behind, getting out of the window.
It was the figure of a man, I should say about twenty-five or
thirty: he had just raised himself to the ledge, and was poising to
leap; for the room, as I afterwards learned, though on the ground
floor, stood raised on a basement above the garden behind. I
couldn't see the man's face, or any part of him, indeed, except his
stooping back, and his feet, and his neck, and his elbows. But what
little I saw was printed indelibly on the very fibre of my nature. I
could have recognised that man anywhere if I saw him in the same
attitude. I could have sworn to him in any court of justice on the
strength of his back alone, so vividly did I picture it.

He was tall and thin, but he stooped like a hunchback.

There were other points worth notice in that strange mental
photograph. The man was well-dressed, and had the bearing of a
gentleman. Looking back upon the scene long after, when I had
learned once more what words and things meant, I could feel
instinctively this was no common burglar, no vulgar murderer.
Whatever might have been the man's object in shooting my father, I