th
the beard. The water, when Lady Glyde attempted to drink it, had so
strange a taste that it increased her faintness, and she hastily took
the bottle of salts from Count Fosco, and smelt at it. Her head became
giddy on the instant. The Count caught the bottle as it dropped out of
her hand, and the last impression of which she was conscious was that
he held it to her nostrils again.

From this point her recollections were found to be confused,
fragmentary, and difficult to reconcile with any reasonable probability.

Her own impression was that she recovered her senses later in the
evening, that she then left the house, that she went (as she had
previously arranged to go, at Blackwater Park) to Mrs. Vesey's--that
she drank tea there, and that she passed the night under Mrs. Vesey's
roof. She was totally unable to say how, or when, or in what company
she left the house to which Count Fosco had brought her. But she
persisted in asserting that she had been to Mrs. Vesey's, and still
more extraordinary, that she had been helped to undress and get to bed
by Mrs. Rubelle! She could not remember what the conversation was at
Mrs. Vesey's or whom she saw there besides that lady, or why Mrs.
Rubelle should have been present in the house to help her.

Her recollection of what happened to her the next morning was still
more vague and unreliable.

She had some dim idea of driving out (at what hour she could not say)
with Count Fosco, and with Mrs. Rubelle again for a female attendant.
But when, and why, she left Mrs. Vesey she could not tell; neither did
she know what direction the carriage drove in, or where it set her
down, or whether the Count and Mrs. Rubelle did or did not remain with
her all the time she was out. At this point in her sad story there was
a total blank. She had no impressions of the faintest kind to
communicate--no idea whether one day, or more than one day, had
passed--until she came to herself suddenly in a strange place,
surrounded by women who were all unknown to her.

This was the Asylum. Here she first heard herself called by Anne
Catherick's name, and here, as a last remarkable circumstance in the
story of the conspiracy, her own eyes informed her that she had Anne
Catherick's clothes on. The nurse, on the first night in the Asylum,
had shown her the marks on each article of her underclothing as it was
taken off, and had said, not at all irritably or unkindly, "Look at
your own name on your