less important respect. We could live cheaply
by the daily work of my hands; and could save
every farthing we possessed to forward the purpose
—the righteous purpose of redressing an
infamous wrong, which, from first to last, I now
kept steadily in view.

In a week's time, Marian Halcombe and I had
settled how the course of our new lives should
be directed.

There were no other lodgers in the house;
and we had the means of going in and out
without passing through the shop. I arranged,
for the present at least, that neither Marian
nor Laura should stir outside the door without
my being with them; and that, in my
absence from home, they should let no one into
their rooms on any pretence whatever. This
rule established, I went to a friend whom I had
known in former days—a wood engraver, in large
practice—to seek for employment; telling him,
at the same time, that I had reasons for wishing
to remain unknown. He at once concluded that
I was in debt; expressed his regret in the usual
forms; and then promised to do what he could
to assist me. I left his false impression undisturbed;
and accepted the work he had to give.
He knew that he could trust my experience and
my industry. I had, what he wanted, steadiness
and facility; and though my earnings were
but small, they sufficed for our necessities. As
soon as we could feel certain of this, Marian
Halcombe and I put together what we possessed.
She had between two and three hundred pounds
left of her own property; and I had nearly as
much remaining from the purchase-money
obtained by the sale of my drawing-master's practice
before I left England. Together we made
up between us more than four hundred pounds.
I deposited this little fortune in a bank, to be
kept for the expense of those secret inquiries
and investigations which I was determined to
set on foot, and to carry on by myself if I could
find no one to help me. We calculated our
weekly expenditure to the last farthing; and we
never touched our little fund, except in Laura's
interests and for Laura's sake.

The house-work, which, if we had dared trust
a stranger near us, would have been done by a
servant, was taken on the first day, taken as her
own right, by Marian Halcombe. "What a
woman's hands are fit for," she said, "early
and late, these hands of mine shall do." They
trembled as she held them out. The wasted
arms told their sad story of the past, as she
turned up the sleeves of the poor plain dress
that she wore for safety's sake; but the
unquenchable spirit of the woman burnt bright
in her even yet. I saw the big tears rise thick
in her eyes, and fall slowly over her cheeks
as she looked at me. She dashed them away
with a touch of her old energy, and smiled with
a faint reflexion of her old good spirits. "Don't
doubt my courage, Walter," she pleaded, "it's
my weakness that cries, not me. The housework
shall conquer it, if I can't." And she kept
her word—the victory was won when we met in
the evening, and she sat down to rest. Her large
steady black eyes looked at me with a flash of
their bright firmness of bygone days. "I am
not quite broken down yet," she said ; "I am
worth trusting with my share of the work."
Before I could answer, she added in a whisper,
"And worth trusting with my share in the risk
and the danger, too. Remember that, if the time
comes!"

I did remember it, when the time came.

As early as the end of October, the daily
course of our lives had assumed its settled direction;
and we three were as completely isolated
in our place of concealment, as if the house we
lived in had been a desert island, and the great
network of streets and the thousands of our
fellow-creatures all round us the waters of an
illimitable sea. I could now reckon on some
leisure time for considering what my future plan
of action should be, and how I might arm myself
most securely, at the outset, for the coming
struggle with Sir Percival and the Count.

I gave up all hope of appealing to my recognition
of Laura, or to Marian's recognition of
her, in proof of her identity. If we had loved
her less dearly, if the instinct implanted in us
by that love had not been far more certain than
any exercise of reasoning, far keener than any
process of observation, even we might have
hesitated, on first seeing her. The outward
changes wrought by the suffering and the terror
of the past had fearfully, almost hopelessly,
strengthened the fatal resemblance between
Anne Catherick and herself. In my narrative
of events at the time of my residence in Limmeridge
House, I have recorded, from my own
observation of the two, how the likeness, striking
as it was when viewed generally, failed in many
important points of similarity when tested in
detail. In those former days, if they had both
been seen together, side by side, no person could
for a moment have mistaken them one for the
other—as has happened often in the instances of
twins. I could not say this now. The sorrow
and suffering which I had once blamed myself
for associating even by a passing thought with
the future of Laura Fairlie, had set their profaning
marks on the youth and beauty of her face;
and the fatal resemblance which I had once seen
and shuddered at seeing, in idea only, was now a
real and living resemblance which asserted itself
before my own eyes. Strangers, acquaintances,
friends even who could not look at her as we
looked, if she had been shown to them in the
first days of her rescue from the Asylum, might
have doubted if she were the Laura Fairlie they
had once known, and doubted without blame.

The one remaining chance, which I had at
first thought might be trusted to serve us—the
chance of appealing to her recollection of persons
and events with which no impostor could be
familiar, was proved, by the sad test of our later
experience, to be hopeless. Every little caution
that Marian and I practised towards her; every
little remedy we tried to strengthen and steady
slowly the weakened, shaken faculties, was a
fresh protest in itself against the risk of turning