"Listen! They soon stopped both my shrieks and my breath at once. I
lost consciousness for a time, and when I awoke I found myself in a
close carriage, rattling over a mountain road, through the night.
Late the next morning we reached an uninhabited country house, where
I was again imprisoned, in charge of an old dumb woman, whom Le Noir
called Mrs. Raven. This I afterwards understood to be Willow
Heights, the property of the orphan heiress, Clara Day. And here,
also, for the term of my stay, the presence of the unknown inmate
got the house the reputation of being haunted."
"The old dumb woman was a shade kinder to me than Dorcas Knight had
been, but I did not stay in her charge very long. One night the Le
Noirs came in hot haste. The young heiress had been delivered from
their charge by a degree, of the Orphans' Court, and they had to
give up her house. I was drugged and hurried away. Some narcotic
sedative must have been insinuated into all my food, for I was in a
state of semi-sensibility and mild delirium during the whole course
of a long journey by land and sea, which passed to me like a dream,
and at the end of which I found myself here. No doubt, from the
excessive use of narcotics, there was something wild and stupid in
my manner and appearance that justified the charge of madness. And
when I found that I was a prisoner in a lunatic asylum, far, far
away from the neighborhood where at least I had once been known I
gave way to the wilder grief that further confirmed the story of my
madness.
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