fter hearing
it. In the first place, I saw darkly what the nature of the conspiracy
had been, how chances had been watched, and how circumstances had been
handled to ensure impunity to a daring and an intricate crime. While
all details were still a mystery to me, the vile manner in which the
personal resemblance between the woman in white and Lady Glyde had been
turned to account was clear beyond a doubt. It was plain that Anne
Catherick had been introduced into Count Fosco's house as Lady
Glyde--it was plain that Lady Glyde had taken the dead woman's place in
the Asylum--the substitution having been so managed as to make
innocent people (the doctor and the two servants certainly, and the
owner of the mad-house in all probability) accomplices in the crime.

The second conclusion came as the necessary consequence of the first.
We three had no mercy to expect from Count Fosco and Sir Percival
Glyde. The success of the conspiracy had brought with it a clear gain
to those two men of thirty thousand pounds--twenty thousand to one, ten
thousand to the other through his wife. They had that interest, as
well as other interests, in ensuring their impunity from exposure, and
they would leave no stone unturned, no sacrifice unattempted, no
treachery untried, to discover the place in which their victim was
concealed, and to part her from the only friends she had in the
world--Marian Halcombe and myself.

The sense of this serious peril--a peril which every day and every hour
might bring nearer and nearer to us--was the one influence that guided
me in fixing the place of our retreat. I chose it in the far east of
London, where there were fewest idle people to lounge and look about
them in the streets. I chose it in a poor and a populous
neighbourhood--because the harder the struggle for existence among the
men and women about us, the less the risk of their having the time or
taking the pains to notice chance strangers who came among them. These
were the great advantages I looked to, but our locality was a gain to
us also in another and a hardly less important respect. We could live
cheaply by the daily work of my hands, and could save every farthing we
possessed to forward the purpose, the righteous purpose, of redressing
an infamous wrong--which, from first to last, I now kept steadily in
view.

In a week's time Marian Halcombe and I had settled how the course of
our new lives should be directed.

There were no other