in your new
working-room here."

"What made you think of coming to this place?"

"My ignorance of other localities in the neighbourhood of London. I
felt the necessity of getting as far away as possible from our old
lodgings, and I knew something of Fulham, because I had once been at
school there. I despatched a messenger with a note, on the chance that
the school might still be in existence. It was in existence--the
daughters of my old mistress were carrying it on for her, and they
engaged this place from the instructions I had sent. It was just
post-time when the messenger returned to me with the address of the
house. We moved after dark--we came here quite unobserved. Have I
done right, Walter? Have I justified your trust in me?"

I answered her warmly and gratefully, as I really felt. But the
anxious look still remained on her face while I was speaking, and the
first question she asked, when I had done, related to Count Fosco.

I saw that she was thinking of him now with a changed mind. No fresh
outbreak of anger against him, no new appeal to me to hasten the day of
reckoning escaped her. Her conviction that the man's hateful
admiration of herself was really sincere, seemed to have increased a
hundredfold her distrust of his unfathomable cunning, her inborn dread
of the wicked energy and vigilance of all his faculties. Her voice
fell low, her manner was hesitating, her eyes searched into mine with
an eager fear when she asked me what I thought of his message, and what
I meant to do next after hearing it.

"Not many weeks have passed, Marian," I answered, "since my interview
with Mr. Kyrle. When he and I parted, the last words I said to him
about Laura were these: 'Her uncle's house shall open to receive her,
in the presence of every soul who followed the false funeral to the
grave; the lie that records her death shall be publicly erased from the
tombstone by the authority of the head of the family, and the two men
who have wronged her shall answer for their crime to ME, though the
justice that sits in tribunals is powerless to pursue them.' One of
those men is beyond mortal reach. The other remains, and my resolution
remains."

Her eyes lit up--her colour rose. She said nothing, but I saw all her
sympathies gathering to mine in her face.

"I don't disguise from myself, or from you," I went on, "that the
prospect before us is more than doubtful. The risks we have run
already are, it may be, trif