I could hardly imagine what to say or do.  The utmost I could assert with truth was, Jane’s face wasn’t exactly and entirely in all ways unfamiliar to me.  Yet I could see Jane herself was so unfeignedly delighted to see me again, that I hadn’t the heart to confess I’d forgotten her very existence.  So I took her two hands in mine—­ since friendliness begets friendliness—­and holding her off a little way, for fear the kisses should be repeated, I said to her very gravely: 

“You see, Jane, since those days I’ve had a terrible shock, and you can hardly expect me to remember anything.  It’s all like a dream to me.  You must forgive me if I don’t recall it just at once as I ought to do.”

“Oh! yes, miss,” Jane answered, holding my hands in her delight and weeping volubly.  “We’ve read about all that, of course, in the London newspapers.  But there, I’m glad anyhow you remembered to come and look for my lodgings.  I think I should just have sat down and cried if they told me Miss Una’d come back to Woodbury, and never so much as asked to see me.”

I don’t think I ever felt so like a hypocrite in my life before.  But I realised at least that even if Jane’s lodgings were discomfort embodied, I must take them and stop in them, while I remained there, now.  Nothing else was possible.  I couldn’t go elsewhere.

Fortunately, however, the rooms turned out to be as neat as a new pin, and as admirably kept as any woman in England could keep them.  I gathered from the very first, of course, that Jane had been one of the servants at The Grange in the days of my First State; and while I drank my cup of tea, Jane herself came in and talked volubly to me, disclosing to me, parenthetically, the further fact that she was the parlour-maid at the time of my father’s murder.  That gave me a clue to her identity.  Then she was the witness Greenfield who gave evidence at the inquest!  I made a mental note of that, and determined to look up what she’d said to the coroner, in the book of extracts the Inspector gave me, as soon as I got alone in my bedroom that evening.

After dinner, however, Jane came in again, with the freedom of an old servant, and talked to me much about the Woodbury Mystery.  Gradually, as time went on that night, though I remembered nothing definite of myself about her, the sense of familiarity and friendliness came home to me more vividly.  The appropriate emotion seemed easier to rouse, I observed, than the intellectual memory.  I knew Jane and I had been on very good terms, some time, somewhere.  I talked with her easily, for I had a consciousness of companionship.

By-and-by, without revealing to her how little I could recollect about her own personality, I confessed to Jane, by slow degrees, that the whole past was still gone utterly from my shattered memory.  I told her I knew nothing except the Picture and the facts it comprised; and to show her just how small that knowledge really was, I showed her (imprudently enough) the photograph the Inspector had left with me.