And yet, though I said it, I felt all the time it wasn’t really I, but that other strange girl who once lived at The Grange and looked exactly like me.  I remember it, to be sure; but it was in my Other State:  and, so far as my moral responsibility was concerned, my Other State and I were two different people.

For I knew in my heart I couldn’t commit a murder.

Jack rose without a word, and fetched me in some brandy.

“Drink this,” he said calmly, in his authoritative medical tone; “drink this before you say another sentence.”

And, obedient to his order, I took it up and drank it.

Then he sat down beside me, and took my hand in his, and with very gentle words began to reason and argue with me.

He was glad I’d struggled, he said, because that broke the first force of the terrible shock for me.  Action was always good for one in any great crisis.  It gave an outlet for the pent-up emotions, too suddenly let loose with explosive force, and kept them from turning inward and doing serious harm, as mine had done on that horrible night of the accident.  He called it always the accident, I noticed, and never the murder.  That gave me fresh hope.  Could I really after all have fired unintentionally?  But no; when I came to look inward,—­to look backward on my past state,—­I was conscious all the time of some strong and fierce resentment smouldering deep in my heart at the exact moment of firing.  However it might have happened, I was angry with the man with the long white beard:  I fired at him hastily, it is true, but with malice prepense and deliberate intent to wound and hurt him.

Jack went on, however, undeterred, in a low and quiet voice, soothing my hand with his as he spoke, and very kind and gentle.  My spirit rebelled at the thought that I could ever for one moment have imagined him a murderer.  I said so in one wild burst.  Jack held my hand, and still reasoned with me.  I like a man’s reasoning; it’s so calm and impartial.  It seems to overcome one by its mere display of strength.  If I’d changed my mind once, Jack said, I might change it again, when further evidence on the point was again forthcoming.  I mustn’t give myself up to the police till I understood much more.  If I did, I would commit a very grave mistake.  There were reasons that had led to the firing of the shot.  Very grave reasons too.  Couldn’t I restore and reconstruct them, now I knew the last stage of the terrible history?  If possible, he’d rather I should arrive at them by myself than that he should tell me.

I cast my mind back all in vain.

“No, Jack,” I said trustfully.  “I can’t remember anything one bit like that.  I can remember forward, sometimes, but never backwards.  I can remember now how I flung down the pistol, and how the servants burst in.  But not a word, not an item, of what went before.  That’s all a pure blank to me.”

And then I went on to tell him in very brief outline how the first thing I could recollect in all my life was the Australian scene with the big blue-gum-trees; and how that had been recalled to me by the picture at Jane’s; and how one scene in that way had gradually suggested another; and how I could often think ahead from a given fact but never go back behind it and discover what led up to it.