
    »Was Miss Barbary at all connected with your ladyship's family?«
    My lady's lips move, but they utter nothing. She shakes her head.
    »Not connected?« says Mr. Guppy. »O! Not to your ladyship's knowledge,
perhaps? Ah! But might be? Yes.« After each of these interrogatories, she has
inclined her head. »Very good! Now, this Miss Barbary was extremely close -
seems to have been extraordinarily close for a female, females being generally
(in common life at least) rather given to conversation - and my witness never
had an idea whether she possessed a single relative. On one occasion, and only
one, she seems to have been confidential to my witness, on a single point; and
she then told her that the little girl's real name was not Esther Summerson, but
Esther Hawdon.«
    »My God!«
    Mr. Guppy stares. Lady Dedlock sits before him, looking him through, with
the same dark shade upon her face, in the same attitude even to the holding of
the screen, with her lips a little apart, her brow a little contracted, but, for
the moment, dead. He sees her consciousness return, sees a tremor pass across
her frame like a ripple over water, sees her lips shake, sees her compose them
by a great effort, sees her force herself back to the knowledge of his presence,
and of what he has said. All this, so quickly, that her exclamation and her dead
condition seem to have passed away like the features of those long-preserved
dead bodies sometimes opened up in tombs, which, struck by the air like
lightning, vanish in a breath.
    »Your ladyship is acquainted with the name of Hawdon?«
    »I have heard it before.«
    »Name of any collateral, or remote, branch of your ladyship's family?«
    »No.«
    »Now, your ladyship,« says Mr. Guppy, »I come to the last point of the case,
so far as I have got it up. It's going on, and I shall gather it up closer and
closer as it goes on. Your ladyship must know - if your ladyship don't happen,
by any chance, to know already - that there was found dead at the house of a
person named Krook, near Chancery Lane, some time ago, a law-writer in great
distress. Upon which law-writer there was an inquest; and which law-writer was
an anonymous character
