The voice came nearer, and rose and rose more passionately still.  “Hide your face! don’t look at her!  Oh, for God’s sake, spare him——­”

The woman lifted her veil.

“Sacred to the Memory of Laura, Lady Glyde——­”

Laura, Lady Glyde, was standing by the inscription, and was looking at me over the grave.

[The Second Epoch of the Story closes here.]

THE THIRD EPOCH

THE STORY CONTINUED BY WALTER HARTRIGHT.

I

I open a new page.  I advance my narrative by one week.

The history of the interval which I thus pass over must remain unrecorded.  My heart turns faint, my mind sinks in darkness and confusion when I think of it.  This must not be, if I who write am to guide, as I ought, you who read.  This must not be, if the clue that leads through the windings of the story is to remain from end to end untangled in my hands.

A life suddenly changed—­its whole purpose created afresh, its hopes and fears, its struggles, its interests, and its sacrifices all turned at once and for ever into a new direction—­this is the prospect which now opens before me, like the burst of view from a mountain’s top.  I left my narrative in the quiet shadow of Limmeridge church—­I resume it, one week later, in the stir and turmoil of a London street.

The street is in a populous 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 needlework.  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.