I didn’t look them all over at once just then.  I thought it best not to do so.  I would give my memory every possible chance.  Take a few at a time, and see what effect they produced on me.  Perhaps—­though I shrank from the bare idea with horror—­they might rouse in my sleep such another stray effort of spontaneous reconstruction.  Yet the last one had cost me much nervous wear and tear—­much mental agony.

A few days after, I went away from Woodbury.  I had learned for the moment, I thought, all that Woodbury could teach me:  and I longed to get free again for a while from this pervading atmosphere of mystery.  At Aunt Emma’s, at least, all was plain and aboveboard.  I would go back to Barton-on-the-Sea, and rest there for a while, among the heathery hills, before proceeding any further on my voyage of discovery.

But I took back Jane with me.  I was fond of Jane now.  In those two short weeks I had learned to cling to her.  Though I remembered her, strictly speaking, no more than at first, yet the affection I must have borne her in my First State seemed to revive in me very easily, like all other emotions.  I was as much at home with Jane, indeed, as if I had known her for years.  And this wasn’t strange; for I had known her for years, in point of fact; and and though I’d forgotton most of those years, the sense of familiarity they had inspired still lived on with me unconsciously.  I know now that memory resides chiefly in the brain, while the emotions are a wider endowment of the nervous system in general; so that while a great shock may obliterate whole tracts in the memory, no power on earth can ever alter altogether the sentiments and feelings.

As for Jane, she was only too glad to come with me.  There were no lodgers at present, she said; and none expected.  Her sister Elizabeth would take care of the rooms, and if any stranger came, why, Lizzie’d telegraph down at once for her.  So I wrote to Aunt Emma to expect us both next day.  Aunt Emma’s, I knew, was a home where I or mine were always welcome.

Jane had never seen Aunt Emma.  There had been feud between the families while my father lived, so she didn’t visit The Grange after my mother’s death.  Aunt Emma had often explained to me in part how all that happened.  It was the one point in our family history on which she’d ever been explicit:  for she had a grievance there; and what woman on earth can ever suppress her grievances?  It’s our feminine way to air them before the world, as it’s a man’s to bury them deep in his own breast and brood over them.

My mother, she told me, had been a widow when my father married her—­a rich young widow.  She had gone away, a mere girl, to Australia with her first husband, a clergyman, who was lost at sea two or three years after, on the voyage home to England without her.  She had one little girl by her first husband, but the child died quite young:  and then she married my father, who met her first in Australia