Emmeline shook her head.
"Very little," she replied, "and that little, indistinct and vague. Things appear, indeed, to memory; but they look like the ships I have seen sailing over the sea in a thick mist. I catch a cloudy outline--a strange ill-defined form--for one brief instant, flitting by; and then it passes into the fog again, and I see it no more."
"Let us try if we cannot render these images more distinct," said Smeaton. "Do you recollect ever having lived in other places, different from the scenes around you?"
"No," answered Emmeline, at once. "The old house, and the wood, and the hamlet, and the stream, and Ale Head, and the bright bay, are amongst the earliest things that I remember. I do not think I ever lived anywhere else; for I can recollect little things of no consequence happening at the Manor when I must have been quite a child. I remember well crying over a broken puppet in a room that was then called the nursery. I must have been very young then; and memory goes no farther back."
Smeaton mused.
"I think it is very likely you are right," he said. "I do not know that you ever lived elsewhere; but you must have been surrounded in Ale Manor by other people than those who now dwell in it."
"Oh, yes," cried Emmeline. "Of that I am quite sure; for memories come across me, and trouble me like figures in a dream."
"Do you recollect a lady," asked her companion, "tall and graceful, with a smile peculiarly sweet, and a silvery voice?"
Emmeline gazed down thoughtfully.
"Yes," she said, at length, "I think I do; and she was very fond of me, if I remember rightly. Stay! yes, I remember her quite well. You call her back to my mind. She led me out by the hand upon the terrace to see the soldiers go away. Oh, yes--I recollect it all quite well now."