exhaustive woman has already made her own.

The interests--interests, breathless and immense!--with which I am here
concerned, begin with the deplorable calamity of Marian's illness.

The situation at this period was emphatically a serious one. Large sums
of money, due at a certain time, were wanted by Percival (I say nothing
of the modicum equally necessary to myself), and the one source to look
to for supplying them was the fortune of his wife, of which not one
farthing was at his disposal until her death. Bad so far, and worse
still farther on. My lamented friend had private troubles of his own,
into which the delicacy of my disinterested attachment to him forbade
me from inquiring too curiously. I knew nothing but that a woman,
named Anne Catherick, was hidden in the neighbourhood, that she was in
communication with Lady Glyde, and that the disclosure of a secret,
which would be the certain ruin of Percival, might be the result. He
had told me himself that he was a lost man, unless his wife was
silenced, and unless Anne Catherick was found. If he was a lost man,
what would become of our pecuniary interests? Courageous as I am by
nature, I absolutely trembled at the idea!

The whole force of my intelligence was now directed to the finding of
Anne Catherick. Our money affairs, important as they were, admitted of
delay--but the necessity of discovering the woman admitted of none. I
only knew her by description, as presenting an extraordinary personal
resemblance to Lady Glyde. The statement of this curious
fact--intended merely to assist me in identifying the person of whom we
were in search--when coupled with the additional information that Anne
Catherick had escaped from a mad-house, started the first immense
conception in my mind, which subsequently led to such amazing results.
That conception involved nothing less than the complete transformation
of two separate identities. Lady Glyde and Anne Catherick were to
change names, places, and destinies, the one with the other--the
prodigious consequences contemplated by the change being the gain of
thirty thousand pounds, and the eternal preservation of Sir Percival's
secret.

My instincts (which seldom err) suggested to me, on reviewing the
circumstances, that our invisible Anne would, sooner or later, return
to the boat-house at the Blackwater lake. There I posted myself,
previously mentioning to Mrs. Michelson, the housekeeper, that I might
be found when