Chapter 8 - Page 2

seemed
even more marked in the Australian cottage than in the case of the
house which all probability would have inclined one beforehand to
think I must have remembered better. If this was indeed my earliest
home, then I seemed to recollect it far more readily than my later
one.

I turned trembling to Jane, hardly daring to frame the question that
rose first to my lips.

"Is that--my mother?" I faltered out slowly.

But there Jane couldn't help me. She'd never seen the lady, she
said.

"When first I come to The Grange, miss, you see, your mother'd been
buried a year; there was only you and Mr. Callingham in family. And
I never saw that photograph, neither, till I picked it out of the
box locked up in the attic. The little girl might be you, like
enough, when you look at it sideways; and yet again it mightn't. But
the lady I don't know. I never saw your mother."

So I was fain to content myself with pure conjecture.

All day long, however, the new picture haunted me almost as
persistently as the old one.

That night I went to sleep fast, and slept for some hours heavily. I
woke with a start. I had been dreaming very hard. And my dream was
peculiarly clear and lifelike. Never since the first night of my new
life--the night of the murder--had I dreamed such a dream, or seen
dead objects so vividly. It came out in clear colours, like the
terrible Picture that had haunted me so long. And it affected me
strangely. It was a scene, rather than a dream--a scene, as at the
theatre; but a scene in which I realised and recognised everything.

I stood on the steps of a house--a white wooden house, with a
green-painted verandah--the very house I had seen that afternoon in
the faded photograph in Jane's little sitting-room. But I didn't
think of it at first as the house in the old picture: I thought of
it as home--our own place--the cottage. The steps seemed to me very
high, as in childish recollection. A lady walked about on the
verandah and called to me: a lady in a white gown, like the lady in
the photograph, only younger and prettier, and dressed much more
daintily. But I didn't think of her as that either: I called her
mamma to myself: I looked up into her face, oh, ever so much above
me: I must have been very small indeed when that picture first
occurred to me. There was a gentleman, too, in a white linen coat,
who pinched my mamma's ear, and talked softly and musically. But I
didn't think of him quite so: I knew he was my papa: I played about
his knees, a little scampering child, and looked up in his face, and
teased him and laughed at him. My papa looked down at me, and called
me a little kitten, and rolled me over on my back, and fondled me