The servant
was posted at the door to prevent their entrance, but Miss Halcombe
insisted on passing him, and made her way into Mr. Fairlie's presence,
leading her sister by the hand.

The scene that followed, though it only lasted for a few minutes, was
too painful to be described--Miss Halcombe herself shrank from
referring to it. Let it be enough to say that Mr. Fairlie declared, in
the most positive terms, that he did not recognise the woman who had
been brought into his room--that he saw nothing in her face and manner
to make him doubt for a moment that his niece lay buried in Limmeridge
churchyard, and that he would call on the law to protect him if before
the day was over she was not removed from the house.

Taking the very worst view of Mr. Fairlie's selfishness, indolence, and
habitual want of feeling, it was manifestly impossible to suppose that
he was capable of such infamy as secretly recognising and openly
disowning his brother's child. Miss Halcombe humanely and sensibly
allowed all due force to the influence of prejudice and alarm in
preventing him from fairly exercising his perceptions, and accounted
for what had happened in that way. But when she next put the servants
to the test, and found that they too were, in every case, uncertain, to
say the least of it, whether the lady presented to them was their young
mistress or Anne Catherick, of whose resemblance to her they had all
heard, the sad conclusion was inevitable that the change produced in
Lady Glyde's face and manner by her imprisonment in the Asylum was far
more serious than Miss Halcombe had at first supposed. The vile
deception which had asserted her death defied exposure even in the
house where she was born, and among the people with whom she had lived.

In a less critical situation the effort need not have been given up as
hopeless even yet.

For example, the maid, Fanny, who happened to be then absent from
Limmeridge, was expected back in two days, and there would be a chance
of gaining her recognition to start with, seeing that she had been in
much more constant communication with her mistress, and had been much
more heartily attached to her than the other servants. Again, Lady
Glyde might have been privately kept in the house or in the village to
wait until her health was a little recovered and her mind was a little
steadied again. When her memory could be once more trusted to serve
her, she would naturally refer to persons and e