“Good-morning, miss! So you’re here: glad to see you’ve come back again at last to Woodbury.”
This reception dazzled me. It was so strange, so uncanny. I was glad to get away in a fly by myself, and to be driven to lodgings in the clean little High Street. For to me, it wasn’t really “coming back” at all: it was coming to a strange town, where everyone knew me, and I knew nobody.
“You’d like to go to Jane’s, of course,” the driver said to me with a friendly nod as he reached the High Street: and not liking to confess my forgetfulness of Jane, I responded with warmth that Jane’s would, no doubt, exactly suit me.
We drew up at the door of a neat little house. The driver rang the bell.
“Miss Una’s here,” he said, confidentially; “and she’s looking for lodgings.”
It was inexpressibly strange and weird to me, this one-sided recognition, this unfamiliar familiarity: it gave me a queer thrill of the supernatural that I can hardly express to you. But I didn’t know what to do, when a kindly-faced, middle-aged English upper-class servant rushed out at me, open-armed, and hugging me hard to her breast, exclaimed with many loud kisses:
“Miss Una, Miss Una! So it’s YOU, dear; so it is! Then you’ve come back at last to us!”
I could hardly imagine what to say or do. The utmost I could assert with truth was, Jane’s face wasn’t exactly and entirely in all ways unfamiliar to me. Yet I could see Jane herself was so unfeignedly delighted to see me again, that I hadn’t the heart to confess I’d forgotten her very existence. So I took her two hands in mine—since friendliness begets friendliness—and holding her off a little way, for fear the kisses should be repeated, I said to her very gravely:
“You see, Jane, since those days I’ve had a terrible shock, and you can hardly expect me to remember anything. It’s all like a dream to me. You must forgive me if I don’t recall it just at once as I ought to do.”
“Oh! yes, miss,” Jane answered, holding my hands in her delight and weeping volubly. “We’ve read about all that, of course, in the London newspapers. But there, I’m glad anyhow you remembered to come and look for my lodgings. I think I should just have sat down and cried if they told me Miss Una’d come back to Woodbury, and never so much as asked to see me.”