ous and a poor neighbourhood. The ground floor
of one of the houses in it is occupied by a small newsvendor's shop,
and the first floor and the second are let as furnished lodgings of the
humblest kind.

I have taken those two floors in an assumed name. On the upper floor I
live, with a room to work in, a room to sleep in. On the lower floor,
under the same assumed name, two women live, who are described as my
sisters. I get my bread by drawing and engraving on wood for the cheap
periodicals. My sisters are supposed to help me by taking in a little
needle-work. Our poor place of abode, our humble calling, our assumed
relationship, and our assumed name, are all used alike as a means of
hiding us in the house-forest of London. We are numbered no longer
with the people whose lives are open and known. I am an obscure,
unnoticed man, without patron or friend to help me. Marian Halcombe is
nothing now but my eldest sister, who provides for our household wants
by the toil of her own hands. We two, in the estimation of others, are
at once the dupes and the agents of a daring imposture. We are
supposed to be the accomplices of mad Anne Catherick, who claims the
name, the place, and the living personality of dead Lady Glyde.

That is our situation. That is the changed aspect in which we three
must appear, henceforth, in this narrative, for many and many a page to
come.

In the eye of reason and of law, in the estimation of relatives and
friends, according to every received formality of civilised society,
"Laura, Lady Glyde," lay buried with her mother in Limmeridge
churchyard. Torn in her own lifetime from the list of the living, the
daughter of Philip Fairlie and the wife of Percival Glyde might still
exist for her sister, might still exist for me, but to all the world
besides she was dead. Dead to her uncle, who had renounced her; dead
to the servants of the house, who had failed to recognise her; dead to
the persons in authority, who had transmitted her fortune to her
husband and her aunt; dead to my mother and my sister, who believed me
to be the dupe of an adventuress and the victim of a fraud; socially,
morally, legally--dead.

And yet alive! Alive in poverty and in hiding. Alive, with the poor
drawing-master to fight her battle, and to win the way back for her to
her place in the world of living beings.

Did no suspicion, excited by my own knowledge of Anne Catherick's
resemblance to her, cross my mind