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.

I stood on the steps of a house--a white wooden house, with a
green-painted verandah--the very house I had seen that afternoon in
the faded photograph in Jane's little sitting-room. But I didn't
think of it at first as the house in the old picture: I thought of
it as home--our own place--the cottage. The steps seemed to me very
high, as in childish recollection. A lady walked about on the
verandah and called to me: a lady in a white gown, like the lady in
the photograph, only younger and prettier, and dressed much more
daintily. But I didn't think of her as that either: I called her
mamma to myself: I looked up into her face, oh, ever so much above
me: I must have been very small indeed when that picture first
occurred to me. There was a gentleman, too, in a white linen coat,
who pinched my mamma's ear, and talked softly and musically. But I
didn't think of him quite so: I knew he was my papa: I played about
his knees, a little scampering child, and looked up in his face, and
teased him and laughed at him. My papa looked down at me, and called