I was quite firm; but the effect of all this argument was very wearisome, and I began to feel really ill.
"I think I must have been on the point of fainting, when the door was opened suddenly, and Mr.Whitelaw came in.

In the next moment, while the room was spinning round before my eyes, and that dreadful giddiness that comes before a dead faint was growing worse, my father snatched me up in his arms, and threw a handkerchief over my face.

I had just sense enough to know that there was chloroform upon it, and that was all.

When I opened my eyes again, I was lying on a narrow bed, in a dimly-lighted room, with a small fire burning in a rusty grate in one corner, and some tea-things, with a plate of cold meat, on a table near it.

There was a scrap of paper on this table, with a few lines scrawled upon it in pencil, in my father's hand: 'You have had your choice, either to share a prosperous life with me, or to be shut up like a mad woman.