“The very place!” exclaimed the girl, looking up from the darkening print.
“I remember my uncle would take me to see it next day. He’s always so interested in mysteries. I’m sure that’s the very spot he showed me as the one where it must have happened.”
“Did he take the photograph then?”
“No; he hadn’t his camera with him.”
“Then this is the suicide, or whatever it was!” cried Pocket, in uncontrollable excitement. “It’s not only the place; it’s the thing itself. Look at that man on the bench!”
The girl took a long look nearer the window.
“How horrible!” she shuddered. “His head looks as though it were falling off! He might be dying.”
“Dying or dead,” said Pocket, “at the very second the plate was exposed!”
She looked at him in blank horror. His own horror was no less apparent, but it was more understanding. He had Baumgartner’s own confession of his attempts to secure admission to hospital death-beds, even to executions; he expounded Baumgartner on the whole subject, briefly, clumsily, inaccurately enough, and yet with a certain graphic power which brought those incredible theories home to his companion as forcibly as Baumgartner himself had brought them home to Pocket. It was the first she had ever heard of them. But then he had never discussed his photography with her, never showed her plate or print. That it was not merely a hobby, that he was an inventor, a pioneer, she had always felt, without dreaming in what direction or to what extent. Even now she seemed unable to grasp the full significance of the print from the broken negative; and when she would have examined it afresh, there was nothing to see; the June sunshine had done its work, and blotted out the repulsive picture even as she held it in her hands.
“Then what do you think?” she asked at last; her voice was thin and strained with formless terrors.