ies, not ME. The house-work shall conquer it if I
can't." And she kept her word--the victory was won when we met in the
evening, and she sat down to rest. Her large steady black eyes looked
at me with a flash of their bright firmness of bygone days. "I am not
quite broken down yet," she said. "I am worth trusting with my share
of the work." Before I could answer, she added in a whisper, "And
worth trusting with my share in the risk and the danger too. Remember
that, if the time comes!"

I did remember it when the time came.

As early as the end of October the daily course of our lives had
assumed its settled direction, and we three were as completely isolated
in our place of concealment as if the house we lived in had been a
desert island, and the great network of streets and the thousands of
our fellow-creatures all round us the waters of an illimitable sea. I
could now reckon on some leisure time for considering what my future
plan of action should be, and how I might arm myself most securely at
the outset for the coming struggle with Sir Percival and the Count.

I gave up all hope of appealing to my recognition of Laura, or to
Marian's recognition of her, in proof of her identity. If we had loved
her less dearly, if the instinct implanted in us by that love had not
been far more certain than any exercise of reasoning, far keener than
any process of observation, even we might have hesitated on first
seeing her.

The outward changes wrought by the suffering and the terror of the past
had fearfully, almost hopelessly, strengthened the fatal resemblance
between Anne Catherick and herself. In my narrative of events at the
time of my residence in Limmeridge House, I have recorded, from my own
observation of the two, how the likeness, striking as it was when
viewed generally, failed in many important points of similarity when
tested in detail. In those former days, if they had both been seen
together side by side, no person could for a moment have mistaken them
one for the other--as has happened often in the instances of twins. I
could not say this now. The sorrow and suffering which I had once
blamed myself for associating even by a passing thought with the future
of Laura Fairlie, HAD set their profaning marks on the youth and beauty
of her face; and the fatal resemblance which I had once seen and
shuddered at seeing, in idea only, was now a real and living
resemblance which asserted itself before my