Chapter 6 - Page 2

those days I've had a terrible shock, and you
can hardly expect me to remember anything. It's all like a dream to
me. You must forgive me if I don't recall it just at once as I ought
to do."

"Oh! yes, miss," Jane answered, holding my hands in her delight and
weeping volubly. "We've read about all that, of course, in the
London newspapers. But there, I'm glad anyhow you remembered to come
and look for my lodgings. I think I should just have sat down and
cried if they told me Miss Una'd come back to Woodbury, and never so
much as asked to see me."

I don't think I ever felt so like a hypocrite in my life before. But
I realised at least that even if Jane's lodgings were discomfort
embodied, I must take them and stop in them, while I remained there,
now. Nothing else was possible. I COULDN'T go elsewhere.

Fortunately, however, the rooms turned out to be as neat as a new
pin, and as admirably kept as any woman in England could keep them.
I gathered from the very first, of course, that Jane had been one of
the servants at The Grange in the days of my First State; and while
I drank my cup of tea, Jane herself came in and talked volubly to
me, disclosing to me, parenthetically, the further fact that she was
the parlour-maid at the time of my father's murder. That gave me a
clue to her identity. Then she was the witness Greenfield who gave
evidence at the inquest! I made a mental note of that, and
determined to look up what she'd said to the coroner, in the book of
extracts the Inspector gave me, as soon as I got alone in my bedroom
that evening.

After dinner, however, Jane came in again, with the freedom of an
old servant, and talked to me much about the Woodbury Mystery.
Gradually, as time went on that night, though I remembered nothing
definite of myself about her, the sense of familiarity and
friendliness came home to me more vividly. The appropriate emotion
seemed easier to rouse, I observed, than the intellectual memory. I
knew Jane and I had been on very good terms, some time, somewhere. I
talked with her easily, for I had a consciousness of companionship.

By-and-by, without revealing to her how little I could recollect
about her own personality, I confessed to Jane, by slow degrees,
that the whole past was still gone utterly from my shattered memory.
I told her I knew nothing except the Picture and the facts it
comprised; and to show her just how small that knowledge really was,
I showed her (imprudently enough) the photograph the Inspector had
left with me.

Jane looked at it long and slowly, with tears in her eyes. Then she
said at last, after a deep pause, in a very hushed voice:

"Why, how did you get this? It wasn't put in the