On the way out to Quebec, the sea seemed to revive strange memories.  I had never crossed it before, except long, long ago, on my way home from Australia.  And now that I sat on deck, in a wicker-chair, and looked at the deep dark waves by myself, I began once more, in vague snatches, to recall that earlier voyage.  It came back to me all of itself.  And that was quite in keeping with my previous recollections.  My past life, I felt sure, was unfolding itself slowly to me in regular succession, from childhood onward.

Sitting there on the quarter-deck, gazing hard at the waves, I remembered how I had played on a similar ship years and years before, a little girl in short frocks, with my mamma in a long folding-chair beside me.  I could see my mamma, with a sort of frightened smile on her poor pale face; and she looked so unhappy.  My papa was there too, somewhat older and greyer—­very unlike the papa of my first Australian picture.  His face was so much hairier.  Mamma cried a good deal at times, and papa tried to comfort her.  Besides, what struck me most, there was no more baby.  I wasn’t even allowed to speak about baby.  That subject was tabooed—­perhaps because it always made mamma cry so much, and press me hard to her bosom.  At any rate, I remembered how once I spoke of baby to some fellow-passenger in the saloon, and papa was very angry, and caught me up in his arms and took me down to my berth; and there I had to stop all day by myself (though it was rolling hard) and could have no fruit for dinner, because I’d been naughty.  I was strictly enjoined never to mention baby to anyone again, either then or at any time.  I was to forget all about her.

Day after day, as we sailed on, reminiscences of the same sort crowded thicker and thicker upon me.  Never reminiscences of my later life, but always early scenes brought up by distinct suggestion of that Australian voyage.  When we passed a ship, it burst upon me how we’d passed such ships before:  when there was fire-drill on deck, I remembered having assisted years earlier at just such fire-drill.  The whole past came back like a dream, so that I could reconstruct now the first five or six years of my life almost entirely.  And yet, even so there was a gap, a puzzle, a difficulty somehow.  I couldn’t make the chronology of this slow-returning memory fit in as it ought with the chronology of the facts given to me by Aunt Emma and the Moores of Torquay.  There was a constant discrepancy.  It seemed to me that I must be a year or two older at least than they made me out.  I remembered the voyage home far too well for my age.  I fancied I went back further in my Australian recollections than would be possible from the dates Aunt Emma assigned me.