After a while, another man came in, with an air of authority, and felt my pulse and my brow, and lifted me on to a sofa.  But I didn’t even remember there was such a thing as a doctor.  I lay there for a while, quite dazed; and the man, who was kindly-looking and close-shaven and fatherly, gave me something in a glass:  after which he turned round and examined the body.  He looked hard at the revolver, too, and chalked its place on the ground.  Then I saw no more, for two women lifted me in their arms and took me up to bed; and with that, the first scene of my childhood seemed to end entirely.

I lay in bed for a day or two, during which time I was dimly aware of much commotion going on here and there in the house; and the doctor came night and morning, and tended me carefully.  I suppose I may call him the doctor now, though at the time I didn’t call him so—­I knew him merely as a visible figure.  I don’t believe I thought at all during those earliest days, or gave things names in any known language.  They rather passed before me dreamily in long procession, like a vague panorama.  When people spoke to me, it was like the sound of a foreign tongue.  I attached no more importance to anything they said than to the cawing of the rooks in the trees by the rectory.

At the end of five days, the doctor came once more, and watched me a great deal, and spoke in a low voice with a woman in a white cap and a clean white apron who waited on me daily.  As soon as he was gone, my nurse, as I learned afterwards to call her,—­it’s so hard not to drop into the language of everyday life when one has to describe things to other people,—­my nurse got me up, with much ado and solemnity, and dressed me in a new black frock, very dismal and ugly, and put on me a black hat, with a dreary-looking veil; and took me downstairs, with the aid of a man who wore a suit of blue clothes and a queer kind of helmet.  The man was of the sort I now call a policeman.  These pictures are far less definite in my mind than the one that begins my second life; but still, in a vague kind of way, I pretty well remember them.

On the ground floor, nurse made me walk; and I walked out to the door, where a cab was in waiting, drawn slowly by a pair of horses.  People were looking on, on either side, between the door and the cab—­great crowds of people, peering eagerly forward; and two more men in blue suits were holding them off by main force from surging against me and incommoding me.  I don’t think they wanted to hurt me:  it was rather curiosity than anger I saw in their faces.  But I was afraid, and shrank back.  They were eager to see me, however, and pressed forward with loud cries, so that the men in blue suits had hard work to prevent them.

I know now there were two reasons why they wanted to see me.  I was the murdered man’s daughter, and I was a Psychological Phenomenon.