My instincts (which seldom err) suggested to me, on reviewing the circumstances, that our invisible Anne would, sooner or later, return to the boat-house at the Blackwater lake.  There I posted myself, previously mentioning to Mrs. Michelson, the housekeeper, that I might be found when wanted, immersed in study, in that solitary place.  It is my rule never to make unnecessary mysteries, and never to set people suspecting me for want of a little seasonable candour on my part.  Mrs. Michelson believed in me from first to last.  This ladylike person (widow of a Protestant priest) overflowed with faith.  Touched by such superfluity of simple confidence in a woman of her mature years, I opened the ample reservoirs of my nature and absorbed it all.

I was rewarded for posting myself sentinel at the lake by the appearance—­not of Anne Catherick herself, but of the person in charge of her.  This individual also overflowed with simple faith, which I absorbed in myself, as in the case already mentioned.  I leave her to describe the circumstances (if she has not done so already) under which she introduced me to the object of her maternal care.  When I first saw Anne Catherick she was asleep.  I was electrified by the likeness between this unhappy woman and Lady Glyde.  The details of the grand scheme which had suggested themselves in outline only, up to that period, occurred to me, in all their masterly combination, at the sight of the sleeping face.  At the same time, my heart, always accessible to tender influences, dissolved in tears at the spectacle of suffering before me.  I instantly set myself to impart relief.  In other words, I provided the necessary stimulant for strengthening Anne Catherick to perform the journey to London.

The best years of my life have been passed in the ardent study of medical and chemical science.  Chemistry especially has always had irresistible attractions for me from the enormous, the illimitable power which the knowledge of it confers.  Chemists—­I assert it emphatically—­might sway, if they pleased, the destinies of humanity.  Let me explain this before I go further.

Mind, they say, rules the world.  But what rules the mind?  The body (follow me closely here) lies at the mercy of the most omnipotent of all potentates—­the Chemist.  Give me—­Fosco—­ chemistry; and when Shakespeare has conceived Hamlet, and sits down to execute the conception—­with a few grains of powder dropped into his daily food, I will reduce his mind, by the action of his body, till his pen pours out the most abject drivel that has ever degraded paper.  Under similar circumstances, revive me the illustrious Newton.  I guarantee that when he sees the apple fall he shall eat it, instead of discovering the principle of gravitation.  Nero’s dinner shall transform Nero into the mildest of men before he has done digesting it, and the morning draught of Alexander the Great shall make Alexander run for his life at the first sight of the