The moment he appeared she asked anxiously how long the meeting between her sister and herself was to be still delayed.  At first he returned an evasive answer, but on being pressed, he acknowledged, with great apparent reluctance, that Miss Halcombe was by no means so well as he had hitherto represented her to be.  His tone and manner, in making this reply, so alarmed Lady Glyde, or rather so painfully increased the uneasiness which she had felt in the company of the two strangers, that a sudden faintness overcame her, and she was obliged to ask for a glass of water.  The Count called from the door for water, and for a bottle of smelling-salts.  Both were brought in by the foreign-looking man with 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.