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The Woman in White: Fairlie

Ten minutes later a carriage passed me and a few yards beyond stopped near a policeman. A man put his head from the window and asked: "Have you seen a woman pass this way--a woman in white? She has escaped from my asylum." At a shake of the policeman's head the carriage drove rapidly on. The next day I was at Limmeridge House, Cumberland, in the service of Frederick Fairlie, Esquire. I was there to instruct his two young nieces in the art of painting. I found Marian Halcombe to be dark and ugly, but intelligent. Laura Fairlie, her half-sister, was light, pretty, and dependent. They were devoted to each other, and before my engagement was up I admired the one and loved the other.

My feelings were the cause of my leaving Limmeridge House. Marian Halcombe brought to me a realization of my own heart. "You must leave," she said, "not because you are only a teacher of drawing, but because Laura Fairlie is engaged to be married."

A few days before I left Cumberland, while walking alone in the evening, I was confronted by the same face which had first looked into mine on the London highroad by night. But I was startled less by its sudden reappearance than by my immediate recognition of an ominous likeness between this fugitive from the asylum and my fair pupil at Limmeridge House. Still greater was my consternation when the woman admitted having come to the neighborhood for the sole purpose of thwarting the proposed marriage of Laura Fairlie. I left Limmeridge House, and soon after embarked on an expedition to Central America. The same year Laura Fairlie became the bride of Sir Percival Glyde, Bart., and with her sister went to live at Blackwater Park, her husband's country estate. Count Fosco, an audacious and domineering Italian, and his wife were guests of the household. But all was not as harmonious as an English country party should be. Lady Glyde and her sister, as inseparable and confiding as ever, felt a perceptible coolness rising between them and the two gentlemen. Coolness turned to suspicion and soon to fear. Then it was that Lady Glyde met the Woman in White. The mysterious person stole noiselessly up to her in the twilight one evening and whispered: "If you knew your husband's secret, he would be afraid of you. He would not dare use you as he has used me. I ought to have saved you before it was too late." But before the secret was told there were footsteps in the distance and the woman moved stealthily away.