ingers' ends.

On Wednesday, the 24th of July 1850, I sent my wife in a cab to clear
Mrs. Clements out of the way, in the first place. A supposed message
from Lady Glyde in London was sufficient to obtain this result. Mrs.
Clements was taken away in the cab, and was left in the cab, while my
wife (on pretence of purchasing something at a shop) gave her the slip,
and returned to receive her expected visitor at our house in St. John's
Wood. It is hardly necessary to add that the visitor had been
described to the servants as "Lady Glyde."

In the meanwhile I had followed in another cab, with a note for Anne
Catherick, merely mentioning that Lady Glyde intended to keep Mrs.
Clements to spend the day with her, and that she was to join them under
care of the good gentleman waiting outside, who had already saved her
from discovery in Hampshire by Sir Percival. The "good gentleman" sent
in this note by a street boy, and paused for results a door or two
farther on. At the moment when Anne appeared at the house door and
closed it this excellent man had the cab door open ready for her,
absorbed her into the vehicle, and drove off.

(Pass me, here, one exclamation in parenthesis. How interesting this
is!)

On the way to Forest Road my companion showed no fear. I can be
paternal--no man more so--when I please, and I was intensely paternal
on this occasion. What titles I had to her confidence! I had
compounded the medicine which had done her good--I had warned her of
her danger from Sir Percival. Perhaps I trusted too implicitly to
these titles--perhaps I underrated the keenness of the lower instincts
in persons of weak intellect--it is certain that I neglected to prepare
her sufficiently for a disappointment on entering my house. When I
took her into the drawing-room--when she saw no one present but Madame
Fosco, who was a stranger to her--she exhibited the most violent
agitation; if she had scented danger in the air, as a dog scents the
presence of some creature unseen, her alarm could not have displayed
itself more suddenly and more causelessly. I interposed in vain. The
fear from which she was suffering I might have soothed, but the serious
heart-disease, under which she laboured, was beyond the reach of all
moral palliatives. To my unspeakable horror she was seized with
convulsions--a shock to the system, in her condition, which might have
laid her dead at any moment at our feet.

The nearest doctor was sent fo