CHAPTER VII.

THE GRANGE AT WOODBURY

I stopped for three weeks in Jane’s lodgings; and before the end of that time, Jane and I had got upon the most intimate footing.  It was partly her kindliness that endeared her to me, and her constant sense of continuity with the earlier days which I had quite forgotten; but it was partly too, I felt sure, a vague revival within my own breast of a familiarity that had long ago subsisted between us.  I was coming to myself again, on one side of my nature.  Day by day I grew more certain that while facts had passed away from me, appropriate emotions remained vaguely present.  Among the Woodbury people that I met, I recognised none to say that I knew them; but I knew almost at first sight that I liked this one and disliked that one.  And in every case alike, when I talked the matter over afterwards with Jane, she confirmed my suspicion that in my First State I had liked or disliked just those persons respectively.  My brain was upset, but my heart remained precisely the same as ever.

On my second morning I went up to The Grange with her.  The house was still unlet.  Since the day of the murder, nobody cared to live in it.  The garden and shrubbery had been sadly neglected:  Jane took me out of the way as we walked up the path, to show me the place where the photographic apparatus had been found embedded in the grass, and where the murderer had cut his hands getting over the wall in his frantic agitation.  The wall was pretty high and protected with bottle-glass.  I guessed he must have been tall to scramble over it.  That seemed to tell against Jane’s crude idea that a woman might have done it.

But when I said so to Jane, she met me at once with the crushing reply:  “Perhaps it wasn’t the same person that came back for the box.”  I saw she was right again.  I had jumped at a conclusion.  In cases like this, one must leave no hypothesis untried, jump at no conclusions of any sort.  Clearly, that woman ought to have been made a detective.

As I entered the house the weird sense of familiarity that pursued me throughout rose to a very high pitch.  I couldn’t fairly say, indeed, that I remembered the different rooms.  All I could say with certainty was that I had seen them before.  To this there were three exceptions—­the three that belonged to my Second State—­the library, my bedroom, and the hall and staircase.  The first was indelibly printed on my memory as a component part of the Picture, and I found my recollection of every object in the room almost startling in its correctness.  Only, there was an alcove on one side that I’d quite forgotten, and I saw why most clearly.  I stood with my back to it as I looked at the Picture.  The other two bits I remembered as the room in which I had had my first great illness, and the passage down which I had been carried or helped when I was taken to Aunt Emma’s.