And then she coaxed me to lie down on a little bed. I felt her cover me up; but when she tried to make me drink something from a glass a hideous memory sprang in my mind, and I had struck and knocked the glass out of her hand before I could think what I was doing. I heard her muttering anxiously to herself as she picked the pieces up, and then I was left alone. With confused puzzles moving through my mind I lay there, tense, feverish, tossing, each moment expecting some one to come and tell me I could go home. Finally, I seemed at last really to be going. The only trouble was that the nuns told me I could not leave unless I left as a bride, and they had no satin and no orange flowers. I was startled out of this fancy by voices sounding loud upon the edge of my dream. One said angrily, "In the first place you ought never to have taken her to that infernal house, either for the sake of getting evidence or any other thing." The second retorted, "Well, I wanted to keep her out of the whole business. It was you who insisted on dragging her in; and once you get into this sort of thing difficult situations often present themselves." My eyes opened wide, and in the faint light of the floating candle flames, just above me, I saw Mr. Dingley's face. "You weren't there! Why weren't you there?" I said, sitting up. "You see," a woman's voice that I thought was the Mother Superior's, put in, "she says and does such strange things that I dared not let her go out into the street alone." Then, with an unutterable sense of relief, I recognized father's voice. "Yes, that was quite right. She was better here." And he sat down on the edge of the bed. "Oh, take me home!" I cried. He smiled, and said, with that same exasperating sort of reassurance which the Mother Superior had used, "Yes, we are going immediately." They all made me feel as if they thought that I didn't know what I was talking about. "Either every one is crazy," I thought, "or the whole world is in some plot against me, and they have deceived father, too." Of course my mind knew that to be ridiculous, but everything conspired to make familiar people strange. What was it Mr. Dingley had been telling father just before I returned to consciousness? "Perhaps after I am alone with father at home I can get him to listen to what I want to say," I thought. But there were many reasons why this undertaking was much more difficult than I had supposed. In the first place, it was Mr. Dingley who began by asking me where I had gone. He had been waiting in the front hall for me all the while, he said, and how had I got out without his seeing me? He had hunted all through the rooms on the lower floor, and not finding me, had gone back to our house, supposing I had returned; and from there had set out in search of me.