I took out the photograph, as if unintentionally, when I went to my box, and laid it down with my curling-tongs on the table close by Minnie. Minnie took it up abstractedly and looked at it with an indefinite gaze.
“Why, this is the cricket-field!” she cried, as soon as she collected her senses. “One of your father’s experiments. The earliest acmegraphs. How splendidly they come out! See, that’s Sir Everard at the bottom; and there’s little Jack Hillier above; and this on one side’s Captain Brooks; and there, in front of all—well, you know HIM anyhow, Una. Now, don’t pretend you forget! That’s Courtenay Ivor!”
Her finger was on the man who stood poised ready to jump. With an awful recoil, I drew back and suppressed a scream. It was on the tip of my tongue to cry out, “Why, that’s my father’s murderer!”
But, happily, with a great effort of will I restrained myself. I saw it all at a glance. That, then, was the meaning of Dr. Marten’s warning! No wonder, I thought, the shock had disorganised my whole brain. If Minnie was right, I was in love once with that man. And I must have seen my lover murder my father!
For I didn’t doubt, from what Minnie said, I had really once loved Dr. Ivor. Horrible and ghastly as it might be to realise it, I didn’t doubt it was the truth. I had once loved the very man I was now bent on pursuing as a criminal and a murderer!
“You’re sure that’s him, Minnie?” I cried, trying to conceal my agitation. “You’re sure that’s Courtenay Ivor, the man stooping on the wagon-top?”
Minnie looked at me, smiling. She thought I was asking for a very different reason.
“Yes, that’s him, right enough, dear,” she said. “I could tell him among a thousand. Why, the Moore hand alone would be quite enough to know him by. It’s just like my own. We’ve all of us got it—except yourself. I always said you weren’t one of us. You’re a regular born Callingham.”
I gazed at her fixedly. I could hardly speak.
“Oh, Minnie!” I cried once more, “have you ... have you any photograph of him?”