Faded and dim as it was, the picture riveted my eyes at once by some unknown power of attraction.  I gazed at it long and earnestly.  It represented a house of colonial aspect, square, wood-built, and verandah-girt, standing alone among strange trees whose very names and aspects were then unfamiliar to me, but which I nowadays know to be Australian eucalyptuses.  On the steps of the verandah sat a lady in deep mourning.  A child played by her side, and a collie dog lay curled up still and sleepy in the foreground.  The child, indeed, stirred no chord of any sort in my troubled brain; but my heart came up into my mouth so at sight of the lady, that I said to myself all at once in my awe, “That must surely be my mother!”

The longer I looked at it, the more was I convinced I must have judged aright.  Not indeed that in any true sense I could say I remembered her face or figure:  I was so young when she died, according to everybody’s account, that even if I’d remained in my First State I could hardly have retained any vivid recollection of her.  But both lady and house brought up in me once more to some vague degree that strange consciousness of familiarity I had noticed at The Grange:  and what was odder still, the sense of wont seemed even more marked in the Australian cottage than in the case of the house which all probability would have inclined one beforehand to think I must have remembered better.  If this was indeed my earliest home, then I seemed to recollect it far more readily than my later one.

I turned trembling to Jane, hardly daring to frame the question that rose first to my lips.

“Is that—­my mother?” I faltered out slowly.

But there Jane couldn’t help me.  She’d never seen the lady, she said.

“When first I come to The Grange, miss, you see, your mother’d been buried a year; there was only you and Mr. Callingham in family.  And I never saw that photograph, neither, till I picked it out of the box locked up in the attic.  The little girl might be you, like enough, when you look at it sideways; and yet again it mightn’t.  But the lady I don’t know.  I never saw your mother.”

So I was fain to content myself with pure conjecture.

All day long, however, the new picture haunted me almost as persistently as the old one.

That night I went to sleep fast, and slept for some hours heavily.  I woke with a start.  I had been dreaming very hard.  And my dream was peculiarly clear and lifelike.  Never since the first night of my new life—­the night of the murder—­had I dreamed such a dream, or seen dead objects so vividly.  It came out in clear colours, like the terrible Picture that had haunted me so long.  And it affected me strangely.  It was a scene, rather than a dream—­a scene, as at the theatre; but a scene in which I realised and recognised everything.