I had begun to recognise now that the emotional impression made upon me by people and things was the only sure guide I still possessed as to their connection or association with my past history.  And the rooms at The Grange had each in this way some distinctive characteristic.  The library, of course, was the chief home of the Horror which had hung upon my spirit even during the days when I hardly knew in any intelligible sense the cause of it.  But the drawing-room and dining-room both produced upon my mind a vague consciousness of constraint.  I was dimly aware of being ill at ease and uncomfortable in them.  My own bedroom, on the contrary, gave me a pleasant feeling of rest and freedom and security:  while the servants’-hall and the kitchen seemed perfect paradises of liberty.

“Ah! many’s the time, miss,” Jane said with a sigh, looking over at the empty grate, “you’d come down here to make cakes or puddings, and laugh and joke like a child with Mary an’ me.  I often used to say to Emily—­her as was cook here before Ellen Smith,—­’Miss Una’s never so happy as when she’s down here in the kitchen.’  And ’That’s true what you say,’ says Emily to me, many a time and often.”

That was exactly the impression left upon my own mind.  I began to conclude, in a dim, formless way, that my father must have been a somewhat stern and unsympathetic man; that I had felt constrained and uncomfortable in his presence upstairs, and had often been pleased to get away from his eye to the comparative liberty and ease of my own room or of the maid-servants’ quarters.

At last, in the big attic that had once been the nursery, I paused and looked at Jane.  A queer sensation came over me.

“Jane,” I said slowly, hardly liking to frame the words, “there’s something strange about this room.  He wasn’t cruel to me, was he?”

“Oh! no, miss,” Jane answered promptly.  “He wasn’t never what you might call exactly cruel.  He was a very good father, and looked after you well; but he was sort of stern and moody-like—­would have his own way, and didn’t pay no attention to fads and fancies, he called ’em.  When you were little, many’s the time he sent you up here for punishment—­disobedience and such like.”

I took out the photograph and tried, as it were, to think of my father as alive and with his eyes open.  I couldn’t remember the eyes.  Jane told me they were blue; but I think what she said was the sort of impression the face produced upon me.  A man not unjust or harsh in his dealings with myself, but very strong and masterful.  A man who would have his own way in spite of anybody.  A father who ruled his daughter as a vessel of his making, to be done as he would with, and be moulded to his fashion.

Still, my visit to The Grange resulted in the end in casting very little light upon the problem before me.  It pained and distressed me greatly, but it brought no new elements of the case into view:  at best, it only familiarised me with the scene of action of the tragedy.  The presence of the alcove was the one fresh feature.  Nothing recalled to me as yet in any way the murderer’s features.  I racked my brain in vain; no fresh image came up in it.  I could recollect nothing about the man or his antecedents.