"You must have forgotten some things?"
"Very little, I imagine."
"You were then a little creature of quick feelings: you must, long ere this, have outgrown the impressions with which joy and grief, affection and bereavement, stamped your mind ten years ago."
"You think I have forgotten whom I liked, and in what degree I liked them when a child?"
"The sharpness must be gone--the point, the poignancy--the deep imprint must be softened away and effaced?"
"I have a good memory for those days."
She looked as if she had. Her eyes were the eyes of one who can remember; one whose childhood does not fade like a dream, nor whose youth vanish like a sunbeam. She would not take life, loosely and incoherently, in parts, and let one season slip as she entered on another: she would retain and add; often review from the commencement, and so grow in harmony and consistency as she grew in years. Still I could not quite admit the conviction that all the pictures which now crowded upon me were vivid and visible to her. Her fond attachments, her sports and contests with a well-loved playmate, the patient, true devotion of her child's heart, her fears, her delicate reserves, her little trials, the last piercing pain of separation.... I retraced these things, and shook my head incredulous. She persisted. "The child of seven years lives yet in the girl of seventeen," said she.
"You used to be excessively fond of Mrs. Bretton," I remarked, intending to test her. She set me right at once.
"Not excessively fond," said she; "I liked her: I respected her as I should do now: she seems to me very little altered."
"She is not much changed," I assented.
We were silent a few minutes. Glancing round the room she said, "There are several things here that used to be at Bretton! I remember that pincushion and that looking-glass."
Evidently she was not deceived in her estimate of her own memory; not, at least, so far.
"You think, then, you would have known Mrs. Bretton?" I went on.
"I perfectly remembered her; the turn of her features, her olive complexion, and black hair, her height, her walk, her voice."
"Dr. Bretton, of course," I pursued, "would be out of the question: and, indeed, as I saw your first interview with him, I am aware that he appeared to you as a stranger."
"That first night I was puzzled," she answered.
"How did the recognition between him and your father come about?"
"They exchanged cards. The names Graham Bretton and Home de Bassompierre gave rise to questions and explanations. That was on the second day; but before then I was beginning to know something."