That is not because my memory of the days and weeks that followed is blank in the same way that it was in the hours after I found her. In the immediate shock of her discovery, I actually did, mercifully, have gaps of darkness. But in the weeks and months after that day there are no such lapses in my memory. I did not lose time, it was more as if I gained it. The days and weeks and months hung heavily on me and in the end they seemed to bleed into each other, linked only by a numb pain in my heart. I know that Bell had requested, probably on the very night of the tragedy, to talk to my mother about what had happened. But I obdurately refused. Perhaps this was not rational but it was my wish, and so it was that I returned home without anyone in the house knowing of the events. I was fortunate that night, for I have a memory that young Innes had developed a fever, which proved to last only a night and a day but which kept the entire household so occupied that it was a little time before the change in me was recognized, and then my mother merely assumed that I had exhausted myself by his bedside.
