No Name
by Wilkie Collins
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman
Return to Part 1 of 2

It was a fine moonlight night. He looked round at Magdalen, as he
said those words, to see if her intractable depression of spirits
had seized on her again.

No! her variable humor had changed once more. She looked about
her with a flaunting, feverish gayety; she scoffed at the bare
idea of any serious difficulty with Mrs. Lecount; she mimicked
Noel Vanstone's high-pitched voice, and repeated Noel Vanstone's
high-flown compliments, with a bitter enjoyment of turning him
into ridicule. Instead of running into the house as before, she
sauntered carelessly by her companion's side, humming little
snatches of song, and kicking the loose pebbles right and left on
the garden-walk. Captain Wragge hailed the change in her as the
best of good omens. He thought he saw plain signs that the family
spirit was at last coming back again.

"Well," he said, as he lit her bedroom candle for her, "when we
all meet on the Parade tomorrow, we shall see, as our nautical
friends say, how the land lies. One thing I can tell you, my dear
girl -- I have used my eyes to very little purpose if there is
not a storm brewing tonight in Mr. Noel Vanstone's domestic
atmosphere."

The captain's habitual penetration had not misled him. As soon as
the door of Sea-view Cottage was closed on the parting guests,
Mrs. Lecount made an effort to assert the authority which
Magdalen's influence was threatening already.

She employed every artifice of which she was mistress to
ascertain Magdalen's true position in Noel Vanstone's estimation.
She tried again and again to lure him into an unconscious
confession of the pleasure which he felt already in the society
of the beautiful Miss Bygrave; she twined herself in and out of
every weakness in his character, as the frogs and efts twined
themselves in and out of the rock-work of her Aquarium. But she
made one serious mistake which very clever people in their
intercourse with their intellectual inferiors are almost
universally apt to commit -- she trusted implicitly to the folly
of a fool. She forgot that one of the lowest of human qualities
-- cunning -- is exactly the capacity which is often most largely
developed in the lowest of intellectual natures. If she had been
honestly angry with her master, she would probably have
frightened him. If she had opened her mind plainly to his view,
she would have astonished him by presenting a chain of ideas to
his limited perceptions which they were not strong enough to
grasp; his curiosity would have led him to ask for an
explanation; and by practicing on that curiosity, she might have
had him at her mercy. As it was, she set her cunning against his,
and the fool proved a match for her. Noel Vanstone, to whom all
large-minded motives under heaven were inscrutable mysteries, saw
the small-minded motive at the bottom of his housekeeper's
conduct with as instantaneous a penetration as if he had been a
man of the highest ability. Mrs. Lecount left him for the night,
foiled, and knowing she was foiled -- left him, with the tigerish
side of her uppermost, and a low-lived longing in her elegant
finger-nails to set them in her master's face.

She was not a woman to be beaten by one defeat or by a hundred.
She was positively determined to think, and think again, until
she had found a means of checking the growing intimacy with the
Bygraves at once and forever. In the solitude of her own room she
recovered her composure, and set herself for the first time to
review the conclusions which she had gathered from the events of
the day.

There was something vaguely familiar to her in the voice of this
Miss Bygrave, and, at the same time, in unaccountable
contradiction, something strange to her as well. The face and
figure of the young lady were entirely new to her. It was a
striking face, and a striking figure; and if she had seen either
at any former period, she would certainly have remembered it.
Miss Bygrave was unquestionably a stranger; and yet -- -

She had got no further than this during the day; she could get no
further now: the chain of thought broke. Her mind took up the
fragments, and formed another chain which attached itself to the
lady who was kept in seclusion -- to the aunt, who looked well,
and yet was nervous; who was nervous, and yet able to ply her
needle and thread. An incomprehensible resemblance to some
unremembered voice in the niece; an unintelligible malady which
kept the aunt secluded from public view; an extraordinary range
of scientific cultivation in the uncle, associated with a
coarseness and audacity of manner which by no means suggested the
idea of a man engaged in studious pursuits -- were the members of
this small family of three what they seemed on the surface of
them?

With that question on her mind, she went to bed.

As soon as the candle was out, the darkness seemed to communicate
some inexplicable perversity to her thoughts. They wandered back
from present things to past, in spite of her. They brought her
old master back to life again; they revived forgotten sayings and
doings in the English circle at Zurich; they veered away to the
old man's death-bed at Brighton; they moved from Brighton to
London; they entered the bare, comfortless room at Vauxhall Walk;
they set the Aquarium back in its place on the kitchen table, and
put the false Miss Garth in the chair by the side of it, shading
her inflamed eyes from the light; they placed the anonymous
letter, the letter which glanced darkly at a conspiracy, in her
hand again, and brought her with it into her master's presence;
they recalled the discussion about filling in the blank space in
the advertisement, and the quarrel that followed when she told
Noel Vanstone that the sum he had offered was preposterously
small; they revived an old doubt which had not troubled her for
weeks past -- a doubt whether the threatened conspiracy had
evaporated in mere words, or whether she and her master were
likely to hear of it again. At this point her thoughts broke off
once more, and there was a momentary blank. The next instant she
started up in bed; her heart beating violently, her head whirling
as if she had lost her senses. With electric suddenness her mind
pieced together its scattered multitude of thoughts, and put them
before her plainly under one intelligible form. In the
all-mastering agitation of the moment, she clapped her hands
together, and cried out suddenly in the darkness:

"Miss Vanstone again!!!"

She got out of bed and kindled the light once more. Steady as her
nerves were, the shock of her own suspicion had shaken them. Her
firm hand trembled as she opened her dressing-case and took from
it a little bottle of sal-volatile. In spite of her smooth cheeks
and her well-preserved hair, she looked every year of her age as
she mixed the spirit with water, greedily drank it, and, wrapping
her dressing-gown round her, sat down on the bedside to get
possession again of her calmer self.

She was quite incapable of tracing the mental process which had
led her to discovery. She could not get sufficiently far from
herself to see that her half-formed conclusions on the subject of
the Bygraves had ended in making that family objects of suspicion
to her; that the association of ideas had thereupon carried her
mind back to that other object of suspicion which was represented
by the conspiracy against her master; and that the two ideas of
those two separate subjects of distrust, coming suddenly in
contact, had struck the light. She was not able to reason back in
this way from the effect to the cause. She could only feel that
the suspicion had become more than a suspicion already: c
onviction itself could not have been more firmly rooted in her
mind.

Looking back at Magdalen b y the new light now thrown on her,
Mrs. Lecount would fain have persuaded herself that she
recognized some traces left of the false Miss Garth's face and
figure in the graceful and beautiful girl who had sat at her
master's table hardly an hour since -- that she found
resemblances now, which she had never thought of before, between
the angry voice she had heard in Vauxhall Walk and the smooth,
well-bred tones which still hung on her ears after the evening's
experience downstairs. She would fain have persuaded herself that
she had reached these results with no undue straining of the
truth as she really knew it, but the effort was in vain.

Mrs. Lecount was not a woman to waste time and thought in trying
to impose on herself. She accepted the inevitable conclusion that
the guesswork of a moment had led her to discovery. And, more
than that, she recognized the plain truth -unwelcome as it was --
that the conviction now fixed in her own mind was thus far
unsupported by a single fragment of producible evidence to
justify it to the minds of others.

Under these circumstances, what was the safe course to take with
her master?

If she candidly told him, when they met the next morning, what
had passed through her mind that night, her knowledge of Noel
Vanstone warned her that one of two results would certainly
happen. Either he would be angry and disputatious; would ask for
proofs; and, finding none forthcoming, would accuse her of
alarming him without a cause, to serve her own jealous end of
keeping Magdalen out of the house; or he would be seriously
startled, would clamor for the protection of the law, and would
warn the Bygraves to stand on their defense at the outset. If
Magdalen only had been concerned in the plot this latter
consequence would have assumed no great importance in the
housekeeper's mind. But seeing the deception as she now saw it,
she was far too clever a woman to fail in estimating the
captain's inexhaustible fertility of resource at its true value.
"If I can't meet this impudent villain with plain proofs to help
me," thought Mrs. Lecount, "I may open my master s eyes to-morrow
morning, and Mr. Bygrave will shut them up again before night.
The rascal is playing with all his own cards under the table, and
he will win the game to a certainty, if he sees my hand at
starting."

This policy of waiting was so manifestly the wise policy -- the
wily Mr. Bygrave was so sure to have provided himself, in case of
emergency, with evidence to prove the identity which he and his
niece had assumed for their purpose -- that Mrs. Lecount at once
decided to keep her own counsel the next morning, and to pause
before attacking the conspiracy until she could produce
unanswerable facts to help her. Her master's acquaintance with
the Bygraves was only an acquaintance of one day's standing.
There was no fear of its developing into a dangerous intimacy if
she merely allowed it to continue for a few days more, and if she
permanently checked it, at the latest, in a week's time.

In that period what measures could she take to remove the
obstacles which now stood in her way, and to provide herself with
the weapons which she now wanted?

Reflection showed her three different chances in her favor --
three different ways of arriving at the necessary discovery.

The first chance was to cultivate friendly terms with Magdalen,
and then, taking her unawares, to entrap her into betraying
herself in Noel Vanstone's presence. The second chance was to
write to the elder Miss Vanstone, and to ask (with some alarming
reason for putting the question) for information on the subject
of her younger sister's whereabouts, and of any peculiarities in
her personal appearance which might enable a stranger to identify
her. The third chance was to penetrate the mystery of Mrs.
Bygrave's seclusion, and to ascertain at a personal interview
whether the invalid lady's real complaint might not possibly be a
defective capacity for keeping her husband's secrets. Resolving
to try all three chances, in the order in which they are here
enumerated, and to set her snares for Magdalen on the day that
was now already at hand, Mrs. Lecount at last took off her
dressing-gown and allowed her weaker nature to plead with her for
a little sleep.

The dawn was breaking over the cold gray sea as she lay down in
her bed again. The last idea in her mind before she fell asleep
was characteristic of the woman -- it was an idea that threatened
the captain. "He has trifled with the sacred memory of my
husband," thought the Professor's widow. "On my life and honor, I
will make him pay for it."

Early the next morning Magdalen began the day, according to her
agreement with the captain, by taking Mrs. Wragge out for a
little exercise at an hour when there was no fear of her
attracting the public attention. She pleaded hard to be left at
home; having the Oriental Cashmere Robe still on her mind, and
feeling it necessary to read her directions for dressmaking, for
the hundredth time at least, before (to use her own expression)
she could "screw up her courage to put the scissors into the
stuff." But her companion would take no denial, and she was
forced to go out. The one guileless purpose of the life which
Magdalen now led was the resolution that poor Mrs. Wragge should
not be made a prisoner on her account; and to that resolution she
mechanically clung, as the last token left her by which she knew
her better-self.

They returned later than usual to breakfast. While Mrs. Wragge
was upstairs, straightening herself from head to foot to meet the
morning inspection of her husband's orderly eye; and while
Magdalen and the captain were waiting for her in the parlor, the
servant came in with a note from Sea-view Cottage. The messenger
was waiting for an answer, and the note was addressed to Captain
Wragge.

The captain opened the note and read these lines:

"DEAR SIR -- Mr. Noel Vanstone desires me to write and tell you
that he proposes enjoying this fine day by taking a long drive to
a place on the coast here called Dunwich. He is anxious to know
if you will share the expense of a carriage, and give him the
pleasure of your company and Miss Bygrave's company on this
excursion. I am kindly permitted to be one of the party; and if I
may say so without impropriety, I would venture to add that I
shall feel as much pleasure as my master if you and your young
lady will consent to join us. We propose leaving Aldborough
punctually at eleven o'clock. Believe me, dear sir, your humble
servant,

"VIRGINIE LECOUNT."

"Who is the letter from?" asked Magdalen, noticing a change in
Captain Wragge's face as he read it. "What do they want with us
at Sea-view Cottage?"

"Pardon me," said the captain, gravely, "this requires
consideration. Let me have a minute or two to think."

He took a few turns up and down the room, then suddenly stepped
aside to a table in a corner on which his writing materials were
placed. "I was not born yesterday, ma'am!" said the captain,
speaking jocosely to himself. He winked his brown eye, took up
his pen, and wrote the answer.

"Can you speak now?" inquired Magdalen, when the servant had left
the room. "What does that letter say, and how have you answered
it?"

The captain placed the letter in her hand. "I have accepted the
invitation," he replied, quietly.

Magdalen read the letter. "Hidden enmity yesterday," she said,
"and open friendship to-day. What does it mean?"

"It means," said Captain Wragge, "that Mrs. Lecount is even
sharper than I thought her. She has found you out."

"Impossible," cried Magdalen. "Quite impossible in the time."

"I can't say _how_ she has found you out," proceeded the captain,
with perfect composure. "She may know more of your voice than we
supposed she knew. Or she may have thought us, on reflection,
rather a suspicious family; and anything suspicious in which a
woman was concerned may have taken her mind back to that morning
call of yours in Vauxhall Walk. Whichever way it may be, the
meaning of this sudden change is clear enough. She has found you
out; and she wants to put  her discovery to the proof by slipping
in an awkward question or two, under cover of a little fr iendly
talk. My experience of humanity has been a varied one, and Mrs.
Lecount is not the first sharp practitioner in petticoats whom I
have had to deal with. All the world's a stage, my dear girl, and
one of the scenes on our little stage is shut in from this
moment."

With those words he took his copy of Joyce's Scientific Dialogues
out of his pocket. "You're done with already, my friend!" said
the captain, giving his useful information a farewell smack with
his hand, and locking it up in the cupboard. "Such is human
popularity!" continued the indomitable vagabond, putting the key
cheerfully in his pocket. "Yesterday Joyce was my all-in-all.
To-day I don't care that for him!" He snapped his fingers and sat
down to breakfast.

"I don't understand you," said Magdalen, looking at him angrily.
"Are you leaving me to my own resources for the future?"

"My dear girl!" cried Captain Wragge, "can't you accustom
yourself to my dash of humor yet? I have done with my ready-made
science simply because I am quite sure that Mrs. Lecount has done
believing in me. Haven't I accepted the invitation to Dunwich?
Make your mind easy. The help I have given you already counts for
nothing compared with the help I am going to give you now. My
honor is concerned in bowling out Mrs. Lecount. This last move of
hers has made it a personal matter between us. _The woman
actually thinks she can take me in!!!"_" cried the captain,
striking his knife-handle on the table in a transport of virtuous
indignation. "By heavens, I never was so insulted before in my
life! Draw your chair in to the table, my dear, and give me half
a minute's attention to what I have to say next."

Magdalen obeyed him. Captain Wragge cautiously lowered his voice
before he went on.

"I have told you all along," he said, "the one thing needful is
never to let Mrs. Lecount catch you with your wits
wool-gathering. I say the same after what has happened this
morning. Let her suspect you! I defy her to find a fragment of
foundation for her suspicions, unless we help her. We shall see
to-day if she has been foolish enough to betray herself to her
master before she has any facts to support her. I doubt it. If
she has told him, we will rain down proofs of our identity with
the Bygraves on his feeble little head till it absolutely aches
with conviction. You have two things to do on this excursion.
First, to distrust every word Mrs. Lecount says to you. Secondly,
to exert all your fascinations, and make sure of Mr. Noel
Vanstone, dating from to-day. I will give you the opportunity
when we leave the carriage and take our walk at Dunwich. Wear
your hat, wear your smile; do your figure justice, lace tight;
put on your neatest boots and brightest gloves; tie the miserable
little wretch to your apron-string -- tie him fast; and leave the
whole management of the matter after that to me. Steady! here is
Mrs. Wragge: we must be doubly careful in looking after her now.
Show me your cap, Mrs. Wragge! show me your shoes! What do I see
on your apron? A spot? I won't have spots! Take it off after
breakfast, and put on another. Pull your chair to the middle of
the table -- more to the left -- more still. Make the breakfast."

At a quarter before eleven Mrs. Wragge (with her own entire
concurrence) was dismissed to the back room, to bewilder herself
over the science of dressmaking for the rest of the day.
Punctually as the clock struck the hour, Mrs. Lecount and her
master drove up to the gate of North Shingles, and found Magdalen
and Captain Wragge waiting for them in the garden.

On the way to Dunwich nothing occurred to disturb the enjoyment
of the drive. Noel Vanstone was in excellent health and high
good-humor. Lecount had apologized for the little
misunderstanding of the previous night; Lecount had petitioned
for the excursion as a treat to herself. He thought of these
concessions, and looked at Magdalen, and smirked and simpered
without intermission. Mrs. Lecount acted her part to perfection.
She was motherly with Magdalen and tenderly attentive to Noel
Vanstone. She was deeply interested in Captain Wragge's
conversation, and meekly disappointed to find it turn on general
subjects, to the exclusion of science. Not a word or look escaped
her which hinted in the remotest degree at her real purpose. She
was dressed with her customary elegance and propriety; and she
was the only one of the party on that sultry summer's day who was
perfectly cool in the hottest part of the journey.

As they left the carriage on their arrival at Dunwich, the
captain seized a moment when Mrs. Lecount's eye was off him and
fortified Magdalen by a last warning word.

"'Ware the cat!" he whispered. "She will show her claws on the
way back."

They left the village and walked to the ruins of a convent near
at hand -- the last relic of the once populous city of Dunwich
which has survived the destruction of the place, centuries since,
by the all-devouring sea. After looking at the ruins, they sought
the shade of a little wood between the village and the low
sand-hills which overlook the German Ocean. Here Captain Wragge
maneuvered so as to let Magdalen and Noel Vanstone advance some
distance in front of Mrs. Lecount and himself, took the wrong
path, and immediately lost his way with the most consummate
dexterity. After a few minutes' wandering (in the wrong
direction), he reached an open space near the sea; and politely
opening his camp-stool for the housekeeper's accommodation,
proposed waiting where they were until the missing members of the
party came that way and discovered them.

Mrs. Lecount accepted the proposal. She was perfectly well aware
that her escort had lost himself on purpose, but that discovery
exercised no disturbing influence on the smooth amiability of her
manner. Her day of reckoning with the captain had not come yet --
she merely added the new item to her list, and availed herself of
the camp-stool. Captain Wragge stretched himself in a romantic
attitude at her feet, and the two determined enemies (grouped
like two lovers in a picture) fell into as easy and pleasant a
conversation as if they had been friends of twenty years'
standing.

"I know you, ma'am!" thought the captain, while Mrs. Lecount was
talking to him. "You would like to catch me tripping in my
ready-made science, and you wouldn't object to drown me in the
Professor's Tank!"

"You villain with the brown eye and the green!" thought Mrs.
Lecount, as the captain caught the ball of conversation in his
turn; "thick as your skin is, I'll sting you through it yet!"

In this frame of mind toward each other they talked fluently on
general subjects, on public affairs, on local scenery, on society
in England and society in Switzerland, on health, climate, books,
marriage and money -- talked, without a moment's pause, without a
single misunderstanding on either side for nearly an hour, before
Magdalen and Noel Vanstone strayed that way and made the party of
four complete again.

When they reached the inn at which the carriage was waiting for
them, Captain Wragge left Mrs. Lecount in undisturbed possession
of her master, and signed to Magdalen to drop back for a moment
and speak to him.

"Well?" asked the captain, in a whisper, "is he fast to your
apron-string?"

She shuddered from head to foot as she answered.

"He has kissed my hand," she said. "Does that tell you enough?
Don't let him sit next me on the way home! I have borne all I can
bear -- spare me for the rest of the day."

"I'll put you on the front seat of the carriage," replied the
captain, "side by side with me."

On the journey back Mrs. Lecount verified Captain Wragge's
prediction. She showed her claws.

The time could not have been better chosen; the circumstances
could hardly have favored her more. Magdalen's spirits were
depressed: she was weary in body and mind; and she sat exactly
opposite the housekeeper, who had been compelled, by the new
arrangement, to occupy the seat of honor next her master. With
every facility for observing the slightest changes that passed
over Magdalen's face, Mrs. Lecount tried he r first experiment by
leading the conversation to the subject of London, and to the
relative adv antages offered to residents by the various quarters
of the metropolis on both sides of the river. The ever-ready
Wragge penetrated her intention sooner than she had anticipated,
and interposed immediately. "You're coming to Vauxhall Walk,
ma'am," thought the captain; "I'll get there before you."

He entered at once into a purely fictitious description of the
various quarters of London in which he had himself resided; and,
adroitly mentioning Vauxhall Walk as one of them, saved Magdalen
from the sudden question relating to that very locality with
which Mrs. Lecount had proposed startling her, to begin with.
From his residences he passed smoothly to himself, and poured his
whole family history (in the character of Mr. Bygrave) into the
housekeeper's ears -- not forgetting his brother's grave in
Honduras, with the monument by the self-taught negro artist, and
his brother's hugely corpulent widow, on the ground-floor of the
boarding-house at Cheltenham. As a means of giving Magdalen time
to compose herself, this outburst of autobiographical information
attained its object, but it answered no other purpose. Mrs.
Lecount listened, without being imposed on by a single word the
captain said to her. He merely confirmed her conviction of the
hopelessness of taking Noel Vanstone into her confidence before
she had facts to help her against Captain Wragge's otherwise
unassailable position in the identity which he had assumed. She
quietly waited until he had done, and then returned to the
charge.

"It is a coincidence that your uncle should have once resided in
Vauxhall Walk," she said, addressing herself to Magdalen. "Mr.
Noel has a house in the same place, and we lived there before we
came to Aldborough. May I inquire, Miss Bygrave, whether you know
anything of a lady named Miss Garth?"

This time she put the question before the captain could
interfere. Magdalen ought to have been prepared for it by what
had already passed in her presence, but her nerves had been
shaken by the earlier events of the day; and she could only
answer the question in the negative, after an instant's
preliminary pause to control herself. Her hesitation was of too
momentary a nature to attract the attention of any unsuspicious
person. But it lasted long enough to confirm Mrs. Lecount's
private convictions, and to encourage her to advance a little
further.

"I only asked," she continued, steadily fixing her eyes on
Magdalen, steadily disregarding the efforts which Captain Wragge
made to join in the conversation, "because Miss Garth is a
stranger to me, and I am curious to find out what I can about
her. The day before we left town, Miss Bygrave, a person who
presented herself under the name I have mentioned paid us a visit
under very extraordinary circumstances."

With a smooth, ingratiating manner, with a refinement of contempt
which was little less than devilish in its ingenious assumption
of the language of pity, she now boldly described Magdalen's
appearance in disguise in Magdalen's own presence. She
slightingly referred to the master and mistress of Combe-Raven as
persons who had always annoyed the elder and more respectable
branch of the family; she mourned over the children as following
their parents' example, and attempting to take a mercenary
advantage of Mr. Noel Vanstone, under the protection of a
respectable person's character and a respectable person's name.
Cleverly including her master in the conversation, so as to
prevent the captain from effecting a diversion in that quarter;
sparing no petty aggravation; striking at every tender place
which the tongue of a spiteful woman can wound, she would, beyond
all doubt, have carried her point, and tortured Magdalen into
openly betraying herself, if Captain Wragge had not checked her
in full career by a loud exclamation of alarm, and a sudden
clutch at Magdalen's wrist.

"Ten thousand pardons, my dear madam!" cried the captain. "I see
in my niece's face, I feel in my niece's pulse, that one of her
violent neuralgic attacks has come on again. My dear girl, why
hesitate among friends to confess that you are in pain? What
mistimed politeness! Her face shows she is suffering -- doesn't
it Mrs. Lecount? Darting pains, Mr. Vanstone, darting pains on
the left side of the head. Pull down your veil, my dear, and lean
on me. Our friends will excuse you; our excellent friends will
excuse you for the rest of the day."

Before Mrs. Lecount could throw an instant's doubt on the
genuineness of the neuralgic attack, her master's fidgety
sympathy declared itself exactly as the captain had anticipated,
in the most active manifestations. He stopped the carriage, and
insisted on an immediate change in the arrangement of the places
-- the comfortable back seat for Miss Bygrave and her uncle, the
front seat for Lecount and himself. Had Lecount got her
smelling-bottle? Excellent creature! let her give it directly to
Miss Bygrave, and let the coachman drive carefully. If the
coachman shook Miss Bygrave he should not have a half-penny for
himself. Mesmerism was frequently useful in these cases. Mr. Noel
Vanstone's father had been the most powerful mesmerist in Europe,
and Mr. Noel Vanstone was his father's son. Might he mesmerize?
Might he order that infernal coachman to draw up in a shady place
adapted for the purpose? Would medical help be preferred? Could
medical help be found any nearer than Aldborough? That ass of a
coachman didn't know. Stop every respectable man who passed in a
gig, and ask him if he was a doctor! So Mr. Noel Vanstone ran on,
with brief intervals for breathing-time, in a
continually-ascending scale of sympathy and self-importance,
throughout the drive home.

Mrs. Lecount accepted her defeat without uttering a word. From
the moment when Captain Wragge interrupted her, her thin lips
closed and opened no more for the remainder of the journey. The
warmest expressions of her master's anxiety for the suffering
young lady provoked from her no outward manifestations of anger.
She took as little notice of him as possible. She paid no
attention whatever to the captain, whose exasperating
consideration for his vanquished enemy made him more polite to
her than ever. The nearer and the nearer they got to Aldborough
the more and more fixedly Mrs. Lecount's hard black eyes looked
at Magdalen reclining on the opposite seat, with her eyes closed
and her veil down.

It was only when the carriage stopped at North Shingles, and when
Captain Wragge was handing Magdalen out, that the housekeeper at
last condescended to notice him. As he smiled and took off his
hat at the carriage door, the strong restraint she had laid on
herself suddenly gave way, and she flashed one look at him which
scorched up the captain's politeness on the spot. He turned at
once, with a hasty acknowledgment of Noel Vanstone's last
sympathetic inquiries, and took Magdalen into the house. "I told
you she would show her claws," he said. "It is not my fault that
she scratched you before I could stop her. She hasn't hurt you,
has she?"

"She has hurt me, to some purpose," said Magdalen -- "she has
given me the courage to go on. Say what must be done to-morrow,
and trust me to do it." She sighed heavily as she said those
words, and went up to her room.

Captain Wragge walked meditatively into the parlor, and sat down
to consider. He felt by no means so certain as he could have
wished of the next proceeding on the part of the enemy after the
defeat of that day. The housekeeper's farewell look had plainly
informed him that she was not at the end of her resources yet,
and the old militia-man felt the full importance of preparing
himself in good time to meet the next step which she took in
advance. He lit a cigar, and bent his wary mind on the dangers of
the future.

While Captain Wragge was considering in the parlor at North
Shingles, Mrs. Lecount was meditating in her bedroom at Sea View.
Her exasperation at the failure of her first attempt to expose
the conspiracy had not blinded her to the instant necessity of
making a  second effort before Noel Vanstone's growing
infatuation g ot beyond her control. The snare set for Magdalen
having failed, the chance of entrapping Magd alen's sister was
the next chance to try. Mrs. Lecount ordered a cup of tea, opened
her writing-case, and began the rough draft of a letter to be
sent to Miss Vanstone, the elder, by the morrow's post.

So the day's skirmish ended. The heat of the battle was yet to
come.

CHAPTER VI.

ALL human penetration has its limits. Accurately as Captain
Wragge had seen his way hitherto, even his sharp insight was now
at fault. He finished his cigar with the mortifying conviction
that he was totally unprepared for Mrs. Lecount's next
proceeding. In this emergency, his experience warned him that
there was one safe course, and one only, which he could take. He
resolved to try the confusing effect on the housekeeper of a
complete change of tactics before she had time to press her
advantage and attack him in the dark. With this view he sent the
servant upstairs to request that Miss Bygrave would come down and
speak to him.

"I hope I don't disturb you," said the captain, when Magdalen
entered the room. "Allow me to apologize for the smell of
tobacco, and to say two words on the subject of our next
proceedings. To put it with my customary frankness, Mrs. Lecount
puzzles me, and I propose to return the compliment by puzzling
her. The course of action which I have to suggest is a very
simple one. I have had the honor of giving you a severe neuralgic
attack already, and I beg your permission (when Mr. Noel Vanstone
sends to inquire to-morrow morning) to take the further liberty
of laying you up altogether. Question from Sea-view Cottage: 'How
is Miss Bygrave this morning?' Answer from North Shingles: 'Much
worse: Miss Bygrave is confined to her room.' Question repeated
every day, say for a fortnight: 'How is Miss Bygrave?' Answer
repeated, if necessary, for the same time: 'No better.' Can you
bear the imprisonment? I see no objection to your getting a
breath of fresh air the first thing in the morning, or the last
thing at night. But for the whole of the day, there is no
disguising it, you must put yourself in the same category with
Mrs. Wragge -- you must keep your room."

"What is your object in wishing me to do this?" inquired
Magdalen.

"My object is twofold," replied the captain. "I blush for my own
stupidity; but the fact is, I can't see my way plainly to Mrs.
Lecount's next move. All I feel sure of is, that she means to
make another attempt at opening her master's eyes to the truth.
Whatever means she may employ to discover your identity, personal
communication with you _must_ be necessary to the accomplishment
of her object. Very good. If I stop that communication, I put an
obstacle in her way at starting -- or, as we say at cards, I
force her hand. Do you see the point?"

Magdalen saw it plainly. The captain went on.

"My second reason for shutting you up," he said, "refers entirely
to Mrs. Lecount's master. The growth of love, my dear girl, is,
in one respect, unlike all other growths -- it flourishes under
adverse circumstances. Our first course of action is to make Mr.
Noel Vanstone feel the charm of your society. Our next is to
drive him distracted by the loss of it. I should have proposed a
few more meetings, with a view to furthering this end, but for
our present critical position toward Mrs. Lecount. As it is, we
must trust to the effect you produced yesterday, and try the
experiment of a sudden separation rather sooner than I could have
otherwise wished. I shall see Mr. Noel Vanstone, though you
don't; and if there _is_ a raw place established anywhere about
the region of that gentleman's heart, trust me to hit him on it!
You are now in full possession of my views. Take your time to
consider, and give me your answer -- Yes or no."

"Any change is for the better," said Magdalen "which keeps me out
of the company of Mrs. Lecount and her master! Let it be as you
wish."

She had hitherto answered faintly and wearily; but she spoke
those last words with a heightened tone and a rising color --
signs which warned Captain Wragge not to press her further.

"Very good," said the captain. "As usual, we understand each
other. I see you are tired; and I won't detain you any longer."

He rose to open the door, stopped half-way to it, and came back
again. "Leave me to arrange matters with the servant downstairs,"
he continued. "You can't absolutely keep your bed, and we must
purchase the girl's discretion when she answers the door, without
taking her into our confidence, of course. I will make her
understand that she is to say you are ill, just as she might say
you are not at home, as a way of keeping unwelcome acquaintances
out of the house. Allow me to open the door for you -- I beg your
pardon, you are going into Mrs. Wragge's work-room instead of
going to your own."

"I know I am," said Magdalen. "I wish to remove Mrs. Wragge from
the miserable room she is in now, and to take her upstairs with
me."

"For the evening?"

"For the whole fortnight."

Captain Wragge followed her into the dining-room, and wisely
closed the door before he spoke again.

"Do you seriously mean to inflict my wife's society on yourself
for a fortnight?" he asked, in great surprise.

"Your wife is the only innocent creature in this guilty house,"
she burst out vehemently. "I must and will have her with me!"

"Pray don't agitate yourself," said the captain. "Take Mrs.
Wragge, by all means. I don't want her." Having resigned the
partner of his existence in those terms, he discreetly returned
to the parlor. "The weakness of the sex!" thought the captain,
tapping his sagacious head. "Lay a strain on the female
intellect, and the female temper gives way directly."

The strain to which the captain alluded was not confined that
evening to the female intellect at North Shingles: it extended to
the female intellect at Sea View. For nearly two hours Mrs.
Lecount sat at her desk writing, correcting, and writing again,
before she could produce a letter to Miss Vanstone, the elder,
which exactly accomplished the object she wanted to attain. At
last the rough draft was completed to her satisfaction; and she
made a fair copy of it forthwith, to be posted the next day.

Her letter thus produced was a masterpiece of ingenuity. After
the first preliminary sentences, the housekeeper plainly informed
Norah of the appearance of the visitor in disguise at Vauxhall
Walk; of the conversation which passed at the interview; and of
her own suspicion that the person claiming to be Miss Garth was,
in all probability, the younger Miss Vanstone herself. Having
told the truth thus far, Mrs. Lecount next proceeded to say that
her master was in possession of evidence which would justify him
in putting the law in force; that he knew the conspiracy with
which he was threatened to be then in process of direction
against him at Aldborough; and that he only hesitated to protect
himself in deference to family considerations, and in the hope
that the elder Miss Vanstone might so influence her sister as to
render it unnecessary to proceed to extremities.

Under these circumstances (the letter continued) it was plainly
necessary that the disguised visitor to Vauxhall Walk should be
properly identified; for if Mrs. Lecount's guess proved to be
wrong, and if the person turned out to be a stranger, Mr. Noel
Vanstone was positively resolved to prosecute in his own defense.
Events at Aldborough, on which it was not necessary to dwell,
would enable Mrs. Lecount in a few days to gain sight of the
suspected person in her own character. But as the housekeeper was
entirely unacquainted with the younger Miss Vanstone, it was
obviously desirable that some better informed person should, in
this particular, take the matter in hand. If the elder Miss
Vanstone happened to be at liberty to come to Aldborough herself,
would she kindly write and say so? and Mrs. Lecount would write
back again to appoint a day. If, on the other hand, Miss Vanstone
was prevented from taking the journey, Mrs. Lecount suggested
that her reply should contain the fullest description of her
sister's personal appearance -- should mention any little
peculiarities which might exist in the way of marks on her face
or her hands -- and should state (in case she had written lately)
what the address was in her last letter, and failing that, what
the post-mark was on the envelope. With this information to help
her, Mrs. Lecount would, in the interest of the misguided young
lady herself, accept the responsibility of privately identifying
her, and would write back immediately to acquaint the elder Miss
Vanstone with the result.

The difficulty of sending this letter to the right address gave
Mrs. Lecount very little trouble. Remembering the name of the
lawyer who had pleaded the cause of the two sisters in Michael
Vanstone's time, she directed her letter to "Miss Vanstone, care
of -- -- Pendril, Esquire, London." This she inclosed in a second
envelope, addressed to Mr. Noel Vanstone's solicitor, with a line
inside, requesting that gentleman to send it at once to the
office of Mr. Pendril.

"Now," thought Mrs. Lecount, as she locked the letter up in her
desk, preparatory to posting it the next day with her own hand,
"now I have got her!"

The next morning the servant from Sea View came, with her
master's compliments, to make inquiries after Miss Bygrave's
health. Captain Wragge's bulletin was duly announced -- Miss
Bygrave was so ill as to be confined to her room.

On the reception of this intelligence, Noel Vanstone's anxiety
led him to call at North Shingles himself when he went out for
his afternoon walk. Miss Bygrave was no better. He inquired if he
could see Mr. Bygrave. The worthy captain was prepared to meet
this emergency. He thought a little irritating suspense would do
Noel Vanstone no harm, and he had carefully charged the servant,
in case of necessity, with her answer: "Mr. Bygrave begged to be
excused; he was not able to see any one."

On the second day inquiries were made as before, by message in
the morning, and by Noel Vanstone himself in the afternoon. The
morning answer (relating to Magdalen) was, "a shade better." The
afternoon answer (relating to Captain Wragge) was, "Mr. Bygrave
has just gone out." That evening Noel Vanstone's temper was very
uncertain, and Mrs. Lecount's patience and tact were sorely tried
in the effort to avoid offending him.

On the third morning the report of the suffering young lady was
less favorable -- "Miss Bygrave was still very poorly, and not
able to leave her bed." The servant returning to Sea View with
this message, met the postman, and took into the breakfast-room
with her two letters addressed to Mrs. Lecount.

The first letter was in a handwriting familiar to the
housekeeper. It was from the medical attendant on her invalid
brother at Zurich; and it announced that the patient's malady had
latterly altered in so marked a manner for the better that there
was every hope now of preserving his life.

The address on the second letter was in a strange handwriting.
Mrs. Lecount, concluding that it was the answer from Miss
Vanstone, waited to read it until breakfast was over, and she
could retire to her own room.

She opened the letter, looked at once for the name at the end,
and started a little as she read it. The signature was not "Norah
Vanstone," but "Harriet Garth."

Miss Garth announced that the elder Miss Vanstone had, a week
since, accepted an engagement as governess, subject to the
condition of joining the family of her employer at their
temporary residence in the south of France, and of returning with
them when they came back to England, probably in a month or six
weeks' time. During the interval of this necessary absence Miss
Vanstone had requested Miss Garth to open all her letters, her
main object in making that arrangement being to provide for the
speedy answering of any communication which might arrive for her
from her sister. Miss Magdalen Vanstone had not written since the
middle of July -- on which occasion the postmark on the letter
showed that it must have been posted in London, in the district
of Lambeth -- and her elder sister had left England in a state of
the most distressing anxiety on her account.

Having completed this explanation, Miss Garth then mentioned that
family circumstances prevented her from traveling personally to
Aldborough to assist Mrs. Lecount's object, but that she was
provided with a substitute; in every way fitter for the purpose,
in the person of Mr. Pendril. That gentleman was well acquainted
with Miss Magdalen Vanstone, and his professional experience and
discretion would render his assistance doubly valuable. He had
kindly consented to travel to Aldborough whenever it might be
thought necessary. But as his time was very valuable, Miss Garth
specially requested that he might not be sent for until Mrs.
Lecount was quite sure of the day on which his services might be
required.

While proposing this arrangement, Miss Garth added that she
thought it right to furnish her correspondent with a written
description of the younger Miss Vanstone as well. An emergency
might happen which would allow Mrs. Lecount no time for securing
Mr. Pendril's services; and the execution of Mr. Noel Vanstone's
intentions toward the unhappy girl who was the object of his
forbearance might be fatally delayed by an unforeseen difficulty
in establishing her identity. The personal description,
transmitted under these circumstances, then followed. It omitted
no personal peculiarity by which Magdalen could be recognized,
and it included the "two little moles close together on the left
side of the neck," which had been formerly mentioned in the
printed handbills sent to York.

In conclusion, Miss Garth expressed her fears that Mrs. Lecount's
suspicions were only too likely to be proved true. While,
however, there was the faintest chance that the conspiracy might
turn out to be directed by a stranger, Miss Garth felt bound, in
gratitude toward Mr. Noel Vanstone, to assist the legal
proceedings which would in that case be instituted. She
accordingly appended her own formal denial -- which she would
personally repeat if necessary -- of any identity between herself
and the person in disguise who had made use of her name. She was
the Miss Garth who had filled the situation of the late Mr.
Andrew Vanstone's governess, and she had never in her life been
in, or near, the neighborhood of Vauxhall Wall.

With this disclaimer, and with the writer's fervent assurances
that she would do all for Magdalen's advantage which her sister
might have done if her sister had been in England, the letter
concluded. It was signed in full, and was dated with the
business-like accuracy in such matters which had always
distinguished Miss Garth's character.

This letter placed a formidable weapon in the housekeeper's
hands.

It provided a means of establishing Magdalen's identity through
the intervention of a lawyer by profession. It contained a
personal description minute enough to be used to advantage, if
necessary, before Mr. Pendril's appearance. It presented a signed
exposure of the false Miss Garth under the hand of the true Miss
Garth; and it established the fact that the last letter received
by the elder Miss Vanstone from the younger had been posted (and
therefore probably written) in the neighborhood of Vauxhall Walk.
If any later letter had been received with the Aldborough
postmark, the chain of evidence, so far as the question of
localities was concerned, might doubtless have been more
complete. But as it was, there was testimony enough (aided as
that testimony might be by the fragment of the brown alpaca dress
still in Mrs. Lecount's possession) to raise the veil which hung
over the conspiracy, and to place Mr. Noel Vanstone face to face
with the plain and startling truth.

The one obstacle which now stood in the way of immediate action
on the housekeeper's part was the obstacle of Miss Bygrave's
present seclusion within the limits of her own room. The question
of gaining personal access to her was a question which must be
decided before any communication could be opened with Mr.
Pendril. Mrs. Lecount put on her bonnet at once, and called at
North Shingles to try what discoveries she could make for herself
before post-time

On this occasion Mr. Bygrave was at home, and she was admitted
without  the least difficulty.

Careful consideration that morning had dec ided Captain Wragge on
advancing matters a little nearer to the crisis. The means by
which he proposed achieving this result made it necessary for him
to see the housekeeper and her master separately, and to set them
at variance by producing two totally opposite impressions
relating to himself on their minds. Mrs. Lecount's visit,
therefore, instead of causing him any embarrassment, was the most
welcome occurrence he could have wished for. He received her in
the parlor with a marked restraint of manner for which she was
quite unprepared. His ingratiating smile was gone, and an
impenetrable solemnity of countenance appeared in its stead.

"I have ventured to intrude on you, sir," said Mrs. Lecount, "to
express the regret with which both my master and I have heard of
Miss Bygrave's illness. Is there no improvement?"

"No, ma'am," replied the captain, as briefly as possible. "My
niece is no better."

"I have had some experience, Mr. Bygrave, in nursing. If I could
be of any use -- "

"Thank you, Mrs. Lecount. There is no necessity for our taking
advantage of your kindness."

This plain answer was followed by a moment's silence. The
housekeeper felt some little perplexity. What had become of Mr.
Bygrave's elaborate courtesy, and Mr. Bygrave's many words? Did
he want to offend her? If he did, Mrs. Lecount then and there
determined that he should not gain his object.

"May I inquire the nature of the illness?" she persisted. "It is
not connected, I hope, with our excursion to Dunwich?"

"I regret to say, ma'am," replied the captain, "it began with
that neuralgic attack in the carriage."

"So! so!" thought Mrs. Lecount. "He doesn't even _try_ to make me
think the illness a real one; he throws off the mask at starting.
-- Is it a nervous illness, sir?" she added, aloud.

The captain answered by a solemn affirmative inclination of the
head.

"Then you have _two_ nervous sufferers in the house, Mr.
Bygrave?"

"Yes, ma'am -- two. My wife and my niece."

"That is rather a strange coincidence of misfortunes."

"It is, ma'am. Very strange."

In spite of Mrs. Lecount's resolution not to be offended, Captain
Wragge's exasperating insensibility to every stroke she aimed at
him began to ruffle her. She was conscious of some little
difficulty in securing her self-possession before she could say
anything more.

"Is there no immediate hope," she resumed, "of Miss Bygrave being
able to leave her room?"

"None whatever, ma'am."

"You are satisfied, I suppose, with the medical attendance?"

"I have no medical attendance," said the captain, composedly. "I
watch the case myself."

The gathering venom in Mrs. Lecount swelled up at that reply, and
overflowed at her lips.

"Your smattering of science, sir," she said, with a malicious
smile, "includes, I presume, a smattering of medicine as well?"

"It does, ma'am," answered the captain, without the slightest
disturbance of face or manner. "I know as much of one as I do of
the other."

The tone in which he spoke those words left Mrs. Lecount but one
dignified alternative. She rose to terminate the interview. The
temptation of the moment proved too much for her, and she could
not resist casting the shadow of a threat over Captain Wragge at
parting.

"I defer thanking you, sir, for the manner in which you have
received me," she said, "until I can pay my debt of obligation to
some purpose. In the meantime I am glad to infer, from the
absence of a medical attendant in the house, that Miss Bygrave's
illness is much less serious than I had supposed it to be when I
came here."

"I never contradict a lady, ma'am," rejoined the incorrigible
captain. "If it is your pleasure, when we next meet to think my
niece quite well, I shall bow resignedly to the expression of
your opinion." With those words, he followed the housekeeper into
the passage, and politely opened the door for her. "I mark the
trick, ma'am!" he said to himself, as he closed it again. "The
trump-card in your hand is a sight of my niece, and I'll take
care you don't play it!"

He returned to the parlor, and composedly awaited the next event
which was likely to happen -- a visit from Mrs. Lecount's master.
In less than an hour results justified Captain Wragge's
anticipations, and Noel Vanstone walked in.

"My dear sir!" cried the captain, cordially seizing his visitor's
reluctant hand, "I know what you have come for. Mrs. Lecount has
told you of her visit here, and has no doubt declared that my
niece's illness is a mere subterfuge. You feel surprised -- you
feel hurt -- you suspect me of trifling with your kind sympathies
-- in short, you require an explanation. That explanation you
shall have. Take a seat. Mr. Vanstone. I am about to throw myself
on your sense and judgment as a man of the world. I acknowledge
that we are in a false position, sir; and I tell you plainly at
the outset -- your housekeeper is the cause of it."

For once in his life, Noel Vanstone opened his eyes. "Lecount!"
he exclaimed, in the utmost bewilderment.

"The same, sir," replied Captain Wragge. "I am afraid I offended
Mrs. Lecount, when she came here this morning, by a want of
cordiality in my manner. I am a plain man, and I can't assume
what I don't feel. Far be it from me to breathe a word against
your housekeeper's character. She is, no doubt, a most excellent
and trustworthy woman, but she has one serious failing common to
persons at her time of life who occupy her situation -- she is
jealous of her influence over her master, although you may not
have observed it."

"I beg your pardon," interposed Noel Vanstone; "my observation is
remarkably quick. Nothing escapes me."

"In that case, sir," resumed the captain, "you cannot fail to
have noticed that Mrs. Lecount has allowed her jealousy to affect
her conduct toward my niece?"

Noel Vanstone thought of the domestic passage at arms between
Mrs. Lecount and himself when his guests of the evening had left
Sea View, and failed to see his way to any direct reply. He
expressed the utmost surprise and distress -- he thought Lecount
had done her best to be agreeable on the drive to Dunwich -- he
hoped and trusted there was some unfortunate mistake.

"Do you mean to say, sir," pursued the captain, severely, "that
you have not noticed the circumstance yourself? As a man of honor
and a man of observation, you can't tell me that! Your
housekeeper's superficial civility has not hidden your
housekeeper's real feeling. My niece has seen it, and so have
you, and so have I. My niece, Mr. Vanstone, is a sensitive,
high-spirited girl; and she has positively declined to cultivate
Mrs. Lecount's society for the future. Don't misunderstand me! To
my niece as well as to myself, the attraction of _your_ society,
Mr. Vanstone, remains the same. Miss Bygrave simply declines to
be an apple of discord (if you will permit the classical
allusion) cast into your household. I think she is right so far,
and I frankly confess that I have exaggerated a nervous
indisposition, from which she is really suffering, into a serious
illness -- purely and entirely to prevent these two ladies for
the present from meeting every day on the Parade, and from
carrying unpleasant impressions of each other into your domestic
establishment and mine."

"I allow nothing unpleasant in _my_ establishment," remarked Noel
Vanstone. "I'm master -- you must have noticed that already, Mr.
Bygrave -- I'm master."

"No doubt of it, my dear sir. But to live morning, noon, and
night in the perpetual exercise of your authority is more like
the life of a governor of a prison than the life of a master of a
household. The wear and tear -- consider the wear and tear."

"It strikes you in that light, does it?" said Noel Vanstone,
soothed by Captain Wragge's ready recognition of his authority.
"I don't know that you're not right. But I must take some steps
directly. I won't be made ridiculous -- I'll send Lecount away
altogether, sooner than be made ridiculous." His color rose, and
he folded his little arms fiercely. Captain Wragge's
artfullyirritating explanation had awakened that dormant
suspicion of his housekee per's influence over him which
habitually lay hidden in his mind, and which Mrs. Lecount was n
ow not present to charm back to repose as usual. "What must Miss
Bygrave think of me!" he exclaimed, with a sudden outburst of
vexation. "I'll send Lecount away. Damme, I'll send Lecount away
on the spot!"

"No, no, no!" said the captain, whose interest it was to avoid
driving Mrs. Lecount to any desperate extremities. "Why take
strong measures when mild measures will do? Mrs. Lecount is an
old servant; Mrs. Lecount is attached and useful. She has this
little drawback of jealousy -- jealousy of her domestic position
with her bachelor master. She sees you paying courteous attention
to a handsome young lady; she sees that young lady properly
sensible of your politeness; and, poor soul, she loses her
temper! What is the obvious remedy? Humor her -- make a manly
concession to the weaker sex. If Mrs. Lecount is with you, the
next time we meet on the Parade, walk the other way. If Mrs.
Lecount is not with you, give us the pleasure of your company by
all means. In short, my dear sir, try the _suaviter in modo_ (as
we classical men say) before you commit yourself to the _fortiter
in re!"_

There was one excellent reason why Noel Vanstone should take
Captain Wragge's conciliatory advice. An open rupture with Mrs.
Lecount -- even if he could have summoned the courage to face it
-- would imply the recognition of her claims to a provision, in
acknowledgment of the services she had rendered to his father and
to himself. His sordid nature quailed within him at the bare
prospect of expressing the emotion of gratitude in a pecuniary
form; and, after first consulting appearances by a show of
hesitation, he consented to adopt the captain's suggestion, and
to humor Mrs. Lecount.

"But I must be considered in this matter," proceeded Noel
Vanstone. "My concession to Lecount's weakness must not be
misunderstood. Miss Bygrave must not be allowed to suppose I am
afraid of my housekeeper."

The captain declared that no such idea ever had entered, or ever
could enter, Miss Bygrave's mind. Noel Vanstone returned to the
subject nevertheless, again and again, with his customary
pertinacity. Would it be indiscreet if he asked leave to set
himself right personally with Miss Bygrave? Was there any hope
that he might have the happiness of seeing her on that day? or,
if not, on the next day? or if not, on the day after? Captain
Wragge answered cautiously: he felt the importance of not rousing
Noel Vanstone's distrust by too great an alacrity in complying
with his wishes.

"An interview to-day, my dear sir, is out of the question," he
said. "She is not well enough; she wants repose. To-morrow I
propose taking her out before the heat of the day begins -- not
merely to avoid embarrassment, after what has happened with Mrs.
Lecount, but because the morning air and the morning quiet are
essential in these nervous cases. We are early people here -- we
shall start at seven o'clock. If you are early, too, and if you
would like to join us, I need hardly say that we can feel no
objection to your company on our morning walk. The hour, I am
aware, is an unusual one -- but later in the day my niece may be
resting on the sofa, and may not be able to see visitors."

Having made this proposal purely for the purpose of enabling Noel
Vanstone to escape to North Shingles at an hour in the morning
when his housekeeper would be probably in bed, Captain Wragge
left him to take the hint, if he could, as indirectly as it had
been given. He proved sharp enough (the case being one in which
his own interests were concerned) to close with the proposal on
the spot. Politely declaring that he was always an early man when
the morning presented any special attraction to him, he accepted
the appointment for seven o'clock, and rose soon afterward to
take his leave.

"One word at parting," said Captain Wragge. "This conversation is
entirely between ourselves. Mrs. Lecount must know nothing of the
impression she has produced on my niece. I have only mentioned it
to you to account for my apparently churlish conduct and to
satisfy your own mind. In confidence, Mr. Vanstone -- strictly in
confidence. Good-morning!"

With these parting words, the captain bowed his visitor out.
Unless some unexpected disaster occurred, he now saw his way
safely to the end of the enterprise. He had gained two important
steps in advance that morning. He had sown the seeds of variance
between the housekeeper and her master, and he had given Noel
Vanstone a common interest with Magdalen and himself, in keeping
a secret from Mrs. Lecount. "We have caught our man," thought
Captain Wragge, cheerfully rubbing his hands -- "we have caught
our man at last!"

On leaving North Shingles Noel Vanstone walked straight home,
fully restored to his place in his own estimation, and sternly
determined to carry matters with a high hand if he found himself
in collision with Mrs. Lecount.

The housekeeper received her master at the door with her mildest
manner and her gentlest smile. She addressed him with downcast
eyes; she opposed to his contemplated assertion of independence a
barrier of impenetrable respect.

"May I venture to ask, sir," she began, "if your visit to North
Shingles has led you to form the same conclusion as mine on the
subject of Miss Bygrave's illness?"

"Certainly not, Lecount. I consider your conclusion to have been
both hasty and prejudiced."

"I am sorry to hear it, sir. I felt hurt by Mr. Bygrave's rude
reception of me, but I was not aware that my judgment was
prejudiced by it. Perhaps he received _you_, sir, with a warmer
welcome?"

"He received me like a gentleman -- that is all I think it
necessary to say, Lecount -- he received me like a gentleman."

This answer satisfied Mrs. Lecount on the one doubtful point that
had perplexed her. Whatever Mr. Bygrave's sudden coolness toward
herself might mean, his polite reception of her master implied
that the risk of detection had not daunted him, and that the plot
was still in full progress. The housekeeper's eyes brightened;
she had expressly calculated on this result. After a moment's
thinking, she addressed her master with another question: "You
will probably visit Mr. Bygrave again, sir?"

"Of course I shall visit him -- if I please."

"And perhaps see Miss Bygrave, if she gets better?"

"Why not? I should be glad to know why not? Is it necessary to
ask your leave first, Lecount?"

"By no means, sir. As you have often said (and as I have often
agreed with you), you are master. It may surprise you to hear it,
Mr. Noel, but I have a private reason for wishing that you should
see Miss Bygrave again."

Mr. Noel started a little, and looked at his housekeeper with
some curiosity.

"I have a strange fancy of my own, sir, about that young lady,"
proceeded Mrs. Lecount. "If you will excuse my fancy, and indulge
it, you will do me a favor for which I shall be very grateful."

"A fancy?" repeated her master, in growing surprise. "What
fancy?"

"Only this, sir," said Mrs. Lecount.

She took from one of the neat little pockets of her apron a
morsel of note-paper, carefully folded into the smallest possible
compass, and respectfully placed it in Noel Vanstone's hands.

"If you are willing to oblige an old and faithful servant, Mr.
Noel," she said, in a very quiet and very impressive manner, "you
will kindly put that morsel of paper into your waistcoat pocket;
you will open and read it, for the first time, _when you are next
in Miss Bygrave's company_, and you will say nothing of what has
now passed between us to any living creature, from this time to
that. I promise to explain my strange request, sir, when you have
done what I ask, and when your next interview with Miss Bygrave
has come to an end."

She courtesied with her best grace, and quietly left the room.

Noel Vanstone looked from the folded paper to the door, and from
the door back to the folded paper, in unutterable astonishment. A
mystery in his own house! under his own nose! What did it mean?"

It meant that Mrs. Lecount had not wasted her time that morning.
While the captain was casting the net over his visitor at North
Shingles, the  housekeeper was steadily  mining the ground under
his feet. The folded paper contained nothin g less than a
carefully written extract from the personal description of
Magdalen in Miss Garth's letter. With a daring ingenuity which
even Captain Wragge might have envied, Mrs. Lecount had found her
instrument for exposing the conspiracy in the unsuspecting person
of the victim himself!

CHAPTER VII.

LATE that evening, when Magdalen and Mrs. Wragge came back from
their walk in the dark, the captain stopped Magdalen on her way
upstairs to inform her of the proceedings of the day. He added
the expression of his opinion that the time had come for bringing
Noel Vanstone, with the least possible delay, to the point of
making a proposal. She merely answered that she understood him,
and that she would do what was required of her. Captain Wragge
requested her in that case to oblige him by joining a walking
excursion in Mr. Noel Vanstone's company at seven o'clock the
next morning. "I will be ready," she replied. "Is there anything
more?" There was nothing more. Magdalen bade him good-night and
returned to her own room.

She had shown the same disinclination to remain any longer than
was necessary in the captain's company throughout the three days
of her seclusion in the house.

During all that time, instead of appearing to weary of Mrs.
Wragge's society, she had patiently, almost eagerly, associated
herself with her companion's one absorbing pursuit. She who had
often chafed and fretted in past days under the monotony of her
life in the freedom of Combe-Raven, now accepted without a murmur
the monotony of her life at Mrs. Wragge's work-table. She who had
hated the sight of her needle and thread in old times -- who had
never yet worn an article of dress of her own making -- now
toiled as anxiously over the making of Mrs. Wragge's gown, and
bore as patiently with Mrs. Wragge's blunders, as if the sole
object of her existence had been the successful completion of
that one dress. Anything was welcome to her -- the trivial
difficulties of fitting a gown: the small, ceaseless chatter of
the poor half-witted creature who was so proud of her assistance,
and so happy in her company -- anything was welcome that shut her
out from the coming future, from the destiny to which she stood
self-condemned. That sorely-wounded nature was soothed by such a
trifle now as the grasp of her companion's rough and friendly
hand -- that desolate heart was cheered, when night parted them,
by Mrs. Wragge's kiss.

The captain's isolated position in the house produced no
depressing effect on the captain's easy and equal spirits.
Instead of resenting Magdalen's systematic avoidance of his
society, be looked to results, and highly approved of it. The
more she neglected him for his wife the more directly useful she
became in the character of Mrs. Wragge's self-appointed guardian.
He had more than once seriously contemplated revoking the
concession which had been extorted from him, and removing his
wife, at his own sole responsibility, out of harm's way; and he
had only abandoned the idea on discovering that Magdalen's
resolution to keep Mrs. Wragge in her own company was really
serious. While the two were together, his main anxiety was set at
rest. They kept their door locked by his own desire while he was
out of the house, and, whatever Mrs. Wragge might do, Magdalen
was to be trusted not to open it until he came back. That night
Captain Wragge enjoyed his cigar with a mind at ease, and sipped
his brandy-and-water in happy ignorance of the pitfall which Mrs.
Lecount had prepared for him in the morning.

Punctually at seven o'clock Noel Vanstone made his appearance.
The moment he entered the room Captain Wragge detected a change
in his visitor's look and manner. "Something wrong!" thought the
captain. "We have not done with Mrs. Lecount yet."

"How is Miss Bygrave this morning?" asked Noel Vanstone. "Well
enough, I hope, for our early walk?" His half-closed eyes, weak
and watery with the morning light and the morning air, looked
about the room furtively, and he shifted his place in a restless
manner from one chair to another, as he made those polite
inquiries.

"My niece is better -- she is dressing for the walk," replied the
captain, steadily observing his restless little friend while he
spoke. "Mr. Vanstone!" he added, on a sudden, "I am a plain
Englishman -- excuse my blunt way of speaking my mind. You don't
meet me this morning as cordially as you met me yesterday. There
is something unsettled in your face. I distrust that housekeeper
of yours, sir! Has she been presuming on your forbearance? Has
she been trying to poison your mind against me or my niece?"

If Noel Vanstone had obeyed Mrs. Lecount's injunctions, and had
kept her little morsel of note-paper folded in his pocket until
the time came to use it, Captain Wragge's designedly blunt appeal
might not have found him unprepared with an answer. But curiosity
had got the better of him; he had opened the note at night, and
again in the morning; it had seriously perplexed and startled
him; and it had left his mind far too disturbed to allow him the
possession of his ordinary resources. He hesitated; and his
answer, when he succeeded in making it, began with a
prevarication.

Captain Wragge stopped him before he had got beyond his first
sentence.

"Pardon me, sir," said the captain, in his loftiest manner. "If
you have secrets to keep, you have only to say so, and I have
done. I intrude on no man's secrets. At the same time, Mr.
Vanstone, you must allow me to recall to your memory that I met
you yesterday without any reserves on my side. I admitted you to
my frankest and fullest confidence, sir -- and, highly as I prize
the advantages of your society, I can't consent to cultivate your
friendship on any other than equal terms. "He threw open his
respectable frock-coat and surveyed his visitor with a manly and
virtuous severity.

"I mean no offense!" cried Noel Vanstone, piteously. "Why do you
interrupt me, Mr. Bygrave? Why don't you let me explain? I mean
no offense."

"No offense is taken, sir," said the captain. "You have a perfect
right to the exercise of your own discretion. I am not offended
-- I only claim for myself the same privilege which I accord to
you." He rose with great dignity and rang the bell. "Tell Miss
Bygrave," he said to the servant, "that our walk this morning is
put off until another opportunity, and that I won't trouble her
to come downstairs."

This strong proceeding had the desired effect. Noel Vanstone
vehemently pleaded for a moment's private conversation before the
message was delivered. Captain Wragge's severity partially
relaxed. He sent the servant downstairs again, and, resuming his
chair, waited confidently for results. In calculating the
facilities for practicing on his visitor's weakness, he had one
great superiority over Mrs. Lecount. His judgment was not warped
by latent female jealousies, and he avoided the error into which
the housekeeper had fallen, self-deluded -- the error of
underrating the impression on Noel Vanstone that Magdalen had
produced. One of the forces in this world which no middle-aged
woman is capable of estimating at its full value, when it acts
against her, is the force of beauty in a woman younger than
herself.

"You are so hasty, Mr. Bygrave -- you won't give me time -- you
won't wait and hear what I have to say!" cried Noel Vanstone,
piteously, when the servant had closed the parlor door.

"My family failing, sir -- the blood of the Bygraves. Accept my
excuses. We are alone, as you wished; pray proceed."

Placed between the alternatives of losing Magdalen's society or
betraying Mrs. Lecount, unenlightened by any suspicion of the
housekeeper's ultimate object, cowed by the immovable scrutiny of
Captain Wragge's inquiring eye, Noel Vanstone was not long in
making his choice. He confusedly described his singular interview
of the previous evening with Mrs. Lecount, and, taking the folded
paper from his pocket, placed it in the captain's hand.

A suspicion of the truth dawned on Captain Wragge's mind the
moment  he saw the mysterious note. He withdrew to the window
before he opened it. The first  lines that attracted his attention
were these: "Oblige me, Mr. Noel,
by comparing the young lady who is now in your company with the
personal description which follows these lines, and which has
been communicated to me by a friend. You shall know the name of
the person described -- which I have left a blank -- as soon as
the evidence of your own eyes has forced you to believe what you
would refuse to credit on the unsupported testimony of Virginie
Lecount."

That was enough for the captain. Before he had read a word of the
description itself, he knew what Mrs. Lecount had done, and felt,
with a profound sense of humiliation, that his female enemy had
taken him by surprise.

There was no time to think; the whole enterprise was threatened
with irrevocable overthrow. The one resource in Captain Wragge's
present situation was to act instantly on the first impulse of
his own audacity. Line by line he read on, and still the ready
inventiveness which had never deserted him yet failed to answer
the call made on it now. He came to the closing sentence -- to
the last words which mentioned the two little moles on Magdalen's
neck. At that crowning point of the description, an idea crossed
his mind; his party-colored eyes twinkled; his curly lips twisted
up at the corners; Wragge was himself again. He wheeled round
suddenly from the window, and looked Noel Vanstone straight in
the face with a grimly-quiet suggestiveness of something serious
to come.

"Pray, sir, do you happen to know anything of Mrs. Lecount's
family?" he inquired.

"A respectable family," said Noel Vanstone -- "that's all I know.
Why do you ask?"

"I am not usually a betting man," pursued Captain Wragge. "But on
this occasion I will lay you any wager you like there is madness
in your housekeeper's family."

"Madness!" repeated Noel Vanstone, amazedly

"Madness!" reiterated the captain, sternly tapping the note with
his forefinger. "I see the cunning of insanity, the suspicion of
insanity, the feline treachery of insanity in every line of this
deplorable document. There is a far more alarming reason, sir,
than I had supposed for Mrs. Lecount's behavior to my niece. It
is clear to me that Miss Bygrave resembles some other lady who
has seriously offended your housekeeper -- who has been formerly
connected, perhaps, with an outbreak of insanity in your
housekeeper -- and who is now evidently confused with my niece in
your housekeeper's wandering mind. That is my conviction, Mr.
Vanstone. I may be right, or I may be wrong. All I say is this --
neither you, nor any man, can assign a sane motive for the
production of that incomprehensible document, and for the use
which you are requested to make of it."

"I don't think Lecount's mad," said Noel Vanstone, with a very
blank look, and a very discomposed manner. "It couldn't have
escaped me, with my habits of observation; it couldn't possibly
have escaped me if Lecount had been mad."

"Very good, my dear sir. In my opinion, she is the subject of an
insane delusion. In your opinion, she is in possession of her
senses, and has some mysterious motive which neither you nor I
can fathom. Either way, there can be no harm in putting Mrs.
Lecount's description to the test, not only as a matter of
curiosity, but for our own private satisfaction on both sides. It
is of course impossible to tell my niece that she is to be made
the subject of such a preposterous experiment as that note of
yours suggests. But you can use your own eyes, Mr. Vanstone; you
can keep your own counsel; and -- mad or not -- you can at least
tell your housekeeper, on the testimony of your own senses, that
she is wrong. Let me look at the description again. The greater
part of it is not worth two straws for any purpose of
identification; hundreds of young ladies have tall figures, fair
complexions, light brown hair, and light gray eyes. You will say,
on the other hand, hundreds of young ladies have not got two
little moles close together on the left side of the neck. Quite
true. The moles supply us with what we scientific men call a
Crucial Test. When my niece comes downstairs, sir, you have my
full permission to take the liberty of looking at her neck."

Noel Vanstone expressed his high approval of the Crucial Test by
smirking and simpering for the first time that morning.

"Of looking at her neck," repeated the captain, returning the
note to his visitor, and then making for the door. "I will go
upstairs myself, Mr. Vanstone," he continued, "and inspect Miss
Bygrave's walking-dress. If she has innocently placed any
obstacles in your way, if her hair is a little too low, or her
frill is a little too high, I will exert my authority, on the
first harmless pretext I can think of, to have those obstacles
removed. All I ask is, that you will choose your opportunity
discreetly, and that you will not allow my niece to suppose that
her neck is the object of a gentleman's inspection."

The moment he was out of the parlor Captain Wragge ascended the
stairs at the top of his speed and knocked at Magdalen's door.
She opened it to him in her walking-dress, obedient to the signal
agreed on between them which summoned her downstairs.

"What have you done with your paints and powders?" asked the
captain, without wasting a word in preliminary explanations.
"They were not in the box of costumes which I sold for you at
Birmingham. Where are they?"

"I have got them here," replied Magdalen. "What can you possibly
mean by wanting them now?"

"Bring them instantly into my dressing-room -- the whole
collection, brushes, palette, and everything. Don't waste time in
asking questions; I'll tell you what has happened as we go on.
Every moment is precious to us. Follow me instantly!"

His face plainly showed that there was a serious reason for his
strange proposal. Magdalen secured her collection of cosmetics
and followed him into the dressing-room. He locked the door,
placed her on a chair close to the light, and then told her what
had happened.

"We are on the brink of detection," proceeded the captain,
carefully mixing his colors with liquid glue, and with a strong
"drier" added from a bottle in his own possession. "There is only
one chance for us (lift up your hair from the left side of your
neck) -- I have told Mr. Noel Vanstone to take a private
opportunity of looking at you; and I am going to give the lie
direct to that she-devil Lecount by painting out your moles."

"They can't be painted out," said Magdalen. "No color will stop
on them."

"_My_ color will," remarked Captain Wragge. "I have tried a
variety of professions in my time -- the profession of painting
among the rest. Did you ever hear of such a thing as a Black Eye?
I lived some months once in the neighborhood of Drury Lane
entirely on Black Eyes. My flesh-color stood on bruises of all
sorts, shades, and sizes, and it will stand, I promise you, on
your moles."

With this assurance, the captain dipped his brush into a little
lump of opaque color which he had mixed in a saucer, and which he
had graduated as nearly as the materials would permit to the
color of Magdalen's skin. After first passing a cambric
handkerchief, with some white powder on it, over the part of her
neck on which he designed to operate, he placed two layers of
color on the moles with the tip of the brush. The process was
performed in a few moments, and the moles, as if by magic,
disappeared from view. Nothing but the closest inspection could
have discovered the artifice by which they had been concealed; at
the distance of two or three feet only, it was perfectly
invisible.

"Wait here five minutes, "said Captain Wragge," to let the paint
dry -- and then join us in the parlor. Mrs. Lecount herself would
be puzzled if she looked at you now."

"Stop!" said Magdalen. "There is one thing you have not told me
yet. How did Mrs. Lecount get the description which you read
downstairs? Whatever else she has seen of me, she has not seen
the mark on my neck -- it is too far back, and too high up; my
hair hides it."

"Who knows of the mark?" asked Captain Wragge.

She turned deadly pale under the anguish of a sudden recollection
of Frank.

"My sister knows it," s he said, faintly.

"Mrs. Lecount may have written to your sister," suggested the
captain:

"Do you think my sister would tell a stranger what no stranger
has a right to know? Never! never!"

"Is there nobody else who could tell Mrs. Lecount? The mark was
mentioned in the handbills at York. Who put it there?"

"Not Norah! Perhaps Mr. Pendril. Perhaps Miss Garth."

"Then Mrs. Lecount has written to Mr. Pendril or Miss Garth --
more likely to Miss Garth. The governess would be easier to deal
with than the lawyer."

"What can she have said to Miss Garth?"

Captain Wragge considered a little.

"I can't say what Mrs. Lecount may have written," he said, "but I
can tell you what I should have written in Mrs. Lecount's place.
I should have frightened Miss Garth by false reports about you,
to begin with, and then I should have asked for personal
particulars, to help a benevolent stranger in restoring you to
your friends. "The angry glitter flashed up instantly in
Magdalen's eyes.

"What _you_ would have done is what Mrs. Lecount has done," she
said, indignantly. "Neither lawyer nor governess shall dispute my
right to my own will and my own way. If Miss Garth thinks she can
control my actions by corresponding with Mrs. Lecount, I will
show Miss Garth she is mistaken! It is high time, Captain Wragge,
to have done with these wretched risks of discovery. We will take
the short way to the end we have in view sooner than Mrs. Lecount
or Miss Garth think for. How long can you give me to wring an
offer of marriage out of that creature downstairs?"

"I dare not give you long," replied Captain Wragge. "Now your
friends know where you are, they may come down on us at a day's
notice. Could you manage it in a week?"

"I'll manage it in half the time," she said, with a hard, defiant
laugh. "Leave us together this morning as you left us at Dunwich,
and take Mrs. Wragge with you, as an excuse for parting company.
Is the paint dry yet? Go downstairs and tell him I am coming
directly."

So, for the second time, Miss Garth's well-meant efforts defeated
their own end. So the fatal force of circumstance turned the hand
that would fain have held Magdalen back into the hand that drove
her on.

The captain returned to his visitor in the parlor, after first
stopping on his way to issue his orders for the walking excursion
to Mrs. Wragge.

"I am shocked to have kept you waiting," he said, sitting down
again confidentially by Noel Vanstone's side. "My only excuse is,
that my niece had accidentally dressed her hair so as to defeat
our object. I have been persuading her to alter it, and young
ladies are apt to be a little obstinate on questions relating to
their toilet. Give her a chair on that side of you when she comes
in, and take your look at her neck comfortably before we start
for our walk."

Magdalen entered the room as he said those words, and after the
first greetings were exchanged, took the chair presented to her
with the most unsuspicious readiness. Noel Vanstone applied the
Crucial Test on the spot, with the highest appreciation of the
fair material which was the subject of experiment. Not the
vestige of a mole was visible on any part of the smooth white
surface of Miss Bygrave's neck. It mutely answered the blinking
inquiry of Noel Vanstone's half-closed eyes by the flattest
practical contradiction of Mrs. Lecount. That one central
incident in the events of the morning was of all the incidents
that had hitherto occurred, the most important in its results.
That one discovery shook the housekeeper's hold on her master as
nothing had shaken it yet.

In a few minutes Mrs. Wragge made her appearance, and excited as
much surprise in Noel Vanstone's mind as he was capable of
feeling while absorbed in the enjoyment of Magdalen's society.
The walking-party left the house at once, directing their steps
northward, so as not to pass the windows of Sea-view Cottage. To
Mrs. Wragge's unutterable astonishment, her husband, for the
first time in the course of their married life, politely offered
her his arm, and led her on in advance of the young people, as if
the privilege of walking alone with her presented some special
attraction to him! "Step out!" whispered the captain, fiercely.
"Leave your niece and Mr. Vanstone alone! If I catch you looking
back at them, I'll put the Oriental Cashmere Robe on the top of
the kitchen fire! Turn your toes out, and keep step -- confound
you, keep step!" Mrs. Wragge kept step to the best of her limited
ability. Her sturdy knees trembled under her. She firmly believed
the captain was intoxicated.

The walk lasted for rather more than an hour. Before nine o'clock
they were all back again at North Shingles. The ladies went at
once into the house. Noel Vanstone remained with Captain Wragge
in the garden. "Well," said the captain, "what do you think now
of Mrs. Lecount?"

"Damn Lecount!" replied Noel Vanstone, in great agitation. "I'm
half inclined to agree with you. I'm half inclined to think my
infernal housekeeper is mad."

He spoke fretfully and unwillingly, as if the merest allusion to
Mrs. Lecount was distasteful to him. His color came and went; his
manner was absent and undecided; he fidgeted restlessly about the
garden walk. It would have been plain to a far less acute
observation than Captain Wragge's, that Magdalen had met his
advances by an unexpected grace and readiness of encouragement
which had entirely overthrown his self-control.

"I never enjoyed a walk so much in my life!" he exclaimed, with a
sudden outburst of enthusiasm. "I hope Miss Bygrave feels all the
better, for it. Do you go out at the same time to-morrow morning?
May I join you again?"

"By all means, Mr. Vanstone," said the Captain, cordially.
"Excuse me for returning to the subject -- but what do you
propose saying to Mrs. Lecount?"

"I don't know. Lecount is a perfect nuisance! What would you do,
Mr. Bygrave, if you were in my place?"

"Allow me to ask a question, my dear sir, before I tell you. What
is your breakfast-hour?"

"Half-past nine."

"Is Mrs. Lecount an early riser?"

"No. Lecount is lazy in the morning. I hate lazy women! If you
were in my place, what should you say to her?"

"I should say nothing," replied Captain Wragge. "I should return
at once by the back way; I should let Mrs. Lecount see me in the
front garden as if I was taking a turn before breakfast; and I
should leave her to suppose that I was only just out of my room.
If she asks you whether you mean to come here today, say No.
Secure a quiet life until circumstances force you to give her an
answer. Then tell the plain truth -- say that Mr. Bygrave's niece
and Mrs. Lecount's description are at variance with each other in
the most important particular, and beg that the subject may not
be mentioned again. There is my advice. What do you think of it?"

If Noel Vanstone could have looked into his counselor's mind, he
might have thought the captain's advice excellently adapted to
serve the captain's interests. As long as Mrs. Lecount could be
kept in ignorance of her master's visits to North Shingles, so
long she would wait until the opportunity came for trying her
experiment, and so long she might be trusted not to endanger the
conspiracy by any further proceedings. Necessarily incapable of
viewing Captain Wragge's advice under this aspect, Noel Vanstone
simply looked at it as offering him a temporary means of escape
from an explanation with his housekeeper. He eagerly declared
that the course of action suggested to him should be followed to
the letter, and returned to Sea View without further delay.

On this occasion Captain Wragge's anticipations were in no
respect falsified by Mrs. Lecount's conduct. She had no suspicion
of her master's visit to North Shingles: she had made up her
mind, if necessary, to wait patiently for his interview with Miss
Bygrave until the end of the week; and she did not embarrass him
by any unexpected questions when he announced his intention of
holding no personal communication with the Bygraves on that day.
All she said was, "Don't you feel well enough, Mr. Noel? or don't
you feel inclined?" He answered, shortly, "I don't feel well
enough"; and there the conversatio n ended.

The next day the proceedings of the previous morning were exactly
repeated. This
time Noel Vanstone went home rapturously with a keepsake in his
breast-pocket; he had taken tender possession of one of Miss
Bygrave's gloves. At intervals during the day, whenever he was
alone, he took out the glove and kissed it with a devotion which
was almost passionate in its fervor. The miserable little
creature luxuriated in his moments of stolen happiness with a
speechless and stealthy delight which was a new sensation to him.
The few young girls whom he had met with, in his father's narrow
circle at Zurich, had felt a mischievous pleasure in treating him
like a quaint little plaything; the strongest impression he could
make on their hearts was an impression in which their lap-dogs
might have rivaled him; the deepest interest he could create in
them was the interest they might have felt in a new trinket or a
new dress. The only women who had hitherto invited his
admiration, and taken his compliments seriously had been women
whose charms were on the wane, and whose chances of marriage were
fast failing them. For the first time in his life he had now
passed hours of happiness in the society of a beautiful girl, who
had left him to think of her afterward without a single
humiliating remembrance to lower him in his own esteem.

Anxiously as he tried to hide it, the change produced in his look
and manner by the new feeling awakened in him was not a change
which could be concealed from Mrs. Lecount. On the second day she
pointedly asked him whether he had not made an arrangement to
call on the Bygraves. He denied it as before. "Perhaps you are
going to-morrow, Mr. Noel?" persisted the housekeeper. He was at
the end of his resources; he was impatient to be rid of her
inquiries; he trusted to his friend at North Shingles to help
him; and this time he answered Yes. "If you see the young lady,"
proceeded Mrs. Lecount, "don't forget that note of mine, sir,
which you have in your waistcoat-pocket." No more was said on
either side, but by that night's post the housekeeper wrote to
Miss Garth. The letter merely acknowledged, with thanks, the
receipt of Miss Garth's communication, and informed her that in a
few days Mrs. Lecount hoped to be in a position to write again
and summon Mr. Pendril to Aldborough.

Late in the evening, when the parlor at North Shingles began to
get dark, and when the captain rang the bell for candles as
usual, he was surprised by hearing Magdalen's voice in the
passage telling the servant to take the lights downstairs again.
She knocked at the door immediately afterward, and glided into
the obscurity of the room like a ghost.

"I have a question to ask you about your plans for to-morrow,"
she said. "My eyes are very weak this evening, and I hope you
will not object to dispense with the candles for a few minutes."

She spoke in low, stifled tones, and felt her way noiselessly to
a chair far removed from the captain in the darkest part of the
room. Sitting near the window, he could just discern the dim
outline of her dress, he could just hear the faint accents of her
voice. For the last two days he had seen nothing of her except
during their morning walk. On that afternoon he had found his
wife crying in the little backroom down-stairs. She could only
tell him that Magdalen had frightened her -- that Magdalen was
going the way again which she had gone when the letter came from
China in the terrible past time at Vauxhall Walk.

"I was sorry to her that you were ill to-day, from Mrs. Wragge,"
said the captain, unconsciously dropping his voice almost to a
whisper as he spoke.

"It doesn't matter," she answered quietly, out of the darkness.
"I am strong enough to suffer, and live. Other girls in my place
would have been happier -they would have suffered, and died. It
doesn't matter; it will be all the same a hundred years hence. Is
he coming again tomorrow morning at seven o'clock?"

"He is coming, if you feel no objection to it."

"I have no objection to make; I have done with objecting. But I
should like to have the time altered. I don't look my best in the
early morning -- -I have bad nights, and I rise haggard and worn.
Write him a note this evening, and tell him to come at twelve
o'clock."

"Twelve is rather late, under the circumstances, for you to be
seen out walking."

"I have no intention of walking. Let him be shown into the parlor
-- "

Her voice died away in silence before she ended the sentence.

"Yes?" said Captain Wragge.

"And leave me alone in the parlor to receive him."

"I understand," said the captain. "An admirable idea. I'll be out
of the way in the dining-room while he is here, and you can come
and tell me about it when he has gone."

There was another moment of silence.

"Is there no way but telling you?" she asked, suddenly. "I can
control myself while he is with me, but I can't answer for what I
may say or do afterward. Is there no other way?"

"Plenty of ways," said the captain. "Here is the first that
occurs to me. Leave the blind down over the window of your room
upstairs before he comes. I will go out on the beach, and wait
there within sight of the house. When I see him come out again, I
will look at the window. If he has said nothing, leave the blind
down. If he has made you an offer, draw the blind up. The signal
is simplicity itself; we can't misunderstand each other. Look
your best to-morrow! Make sure of him, my dear girl -- make sure
of him, if you possibly can."

He had spoken loud enough to feel certain that she had heard him,
but no answering word came from her. The dead silence was only
disturbed by the rustling of her dress, which told him she had
risen from her chair. Her shadowy presence crossed the room
again; the door shut softly; she was gone. He rang the bell
hurriedly for the lights. The servant found him standing close at
the window, looking less self-possessed than usual. He told her
he felt a little poorly, and sent her to the cupboard for the
brandy.

At a few minutes before twelve the next day Captain Wragge
withdrew to his post of observation, concealing himself behind a
fishing-boat drawn up on the beach. Punctually as the hour
struck, he saw Noel Vanstone approach North Shingles and open the
garden gate. When the house door had closed on the visitor,
Captain Wragge settled himself comfortably against the side of
the boat and lit his cigar.

He smoked for half au hour -- for ten minutes over the half-hour,
by his watch. He finished the cigar down to the last morsel of it
that he could hold in his lips. Just as he had thrown away the
end, the door opened again and Noel Vanstone came out.

The captain looked up instantly at Magdalen's window. In the
absorbing excitement of the moment, he counted the seconds. She
might get from the parlor to her own room in less than a minute.
He counted to thirty, and nothing happened. He counted to fifty,
and nothing happened. He gave up counting, and left the boat
impatiently, to return to the house.

As he took his first step forward he saw the signal.

The blind was drawn up.

Cautiously ascending the eminence of the beach, Captain Wragge
looked toward Sea-view Cottage before he showed himself on the
Parade. Noel Vanstone had reached home again; he was just
entering his own door.

"If all your money was offered me to stand in your shoes," said
the captain, looking after him -- "rich as you are, I wouldn't
take it!"

CHAPTER VIII.

ON returning to the house, Captain Wragge received a significant
message from the servant. "Mr. Noel Vanstone would call again at
two o'clock that afternoon, when he hoped to have the pleasure of
finding Mr. Bygrave at home."

The captain's first inquiry after hearing this message referred
to Magdalen. "Where was Miss Bygrave?" "In her own room." "Where
was Mrs. Bygrave?" "In the back parlor." Captain Wragge turned
his steps at once in the latter direction, and found his wife,
for the second time, in tears. She had been sent out of
Magdalen's room for the whole day, and she was at her wits' end
to know what she had done to deserve it. Shortening her
lamentations without ceremony, her husband sent her upstairs on t
he spot, with instructions to knock at the door, and to inquire
whether Magdalen could give
five minutes' attention to a question of importance which must
be settled before two o'clock.

The answer returned was in the negative. Magdalen requested that
the subject on which she was asked to decide might be mentioned
to her in writing. She engaged to reply in the same way, on the
understanding that Mrs. Wragge, and not the servant, should be
employed to deliver the note and to take back the answer.

Captain Wragge forthwith opened his paper-case and wrote these
lines: "Accept my warmest congratulations on the result of your
interview with Mr. N. V. He is coming again at two o'clock -- no
doubt to make his proposals in due form. The question to decide
is, whether I shall press him or not on the subject of
settlements. The considerations for your own mind are two in
number. First, whether the said pressure (without at all
underrating your influence over him) may not squeeze for a long
time before it squeezes money out of Mr. N. V. Secondly, whether
we are altogether justified -- considering our present position
toward a certain sharp practitioner in petticoats -- in running
the risk of delay. Consider these points, and let me have your
decision as soon as convenient."

The answer returned to this note was written in crooked, blotted
characters, strangely unlike Magdalen's usually firm and clear
handwriting. It only contained these words: "Give yourself no
trouble about settlements. Leave the use to which he is to put
his money for the future in my hands."

"Did you see her?" asked the captain, when his wife had delivered
the answer.

"I tried," said Mrs. Wragge, with a fresh burst of tears -- "but
she only opened the door far enough to put out her hand. I took
and gave it a little squeeze -and, oh poor soul, it felt so cold
in mine!"

When Mrs. Lecount's master made his appearance at two o'clock, he
stood alarmingly in need of an anodyne application from Mrs.
Lecount's green fan. The agitation of making his avowal to
Magdalen; the terror of finding himself discovered by the
housekeeper; the tormenting suspicion of the hard pecuniary
conditions which Magdalen's relative and guardian might impose on
him -- all these emotions, stirring in conflict together, had
overpowered his feebly-working heart with a trial that strained
it sorely. He gasped for breath as he sat down in the parlor at
North Shingles, and that ominous bluish pallor which always
overspread his face in moments of agitation now made its warning
appearance again. Captain Wragge seized the brandy bottle in
genuine alarm, and forced his visitor to drink a wine-glassful of
the spirit before a word was said between them on either side.

Restored by the stimulant, and encouraged by the readiness with
which the captain anticipated everything that he had to say, Noel
Vanstone contrived to state the serious object of his visit in
tolerably plain terms. All the conventional preliminaries proper
to the occasion were easily disposed of. The suitor's family was
respectable; his position in life was undeniably satisfactory;
his attachment, though hasty, was evidently disinterested and
sincere. All that Captain Wragge had to do was to refer to these
various considerations with a happy choice of language in a voice
that trembled with manly emotion, and this he did to perfection.
For the first half-hour of the interview, no allusion whatever
was made to the delicate and dangerous part of the subject. The
captain waited until he had composed his visitor, and when that
result was achieved came smoothly to the point in these terms:

"There is one little difficulty, Mr. Vanstone, which I think we
have both overlooked. Your housekeeper's recent conduct inclines
me to fear that she will view the approaching change in your life
with anything but a friendly eye. Probably you have not thought
it necessary yet to inform her of the new tie which you propose
to form?"

Noel Vanstone turned pale at the bare idea of explaining himself
to Mrs. Lecount.

"I can't tell what I'm to do," he said, glancing aside nervously
at the window, as if he expected to see the housekeeper peeping
in. "I hate all awkward positions, and this is the most
unpleasant position I ever was placed in. You don't know what a
terrible woman Lecount is. I'm not afraid of her; pray don't
suppose I'm afraid of her -- "

At those words his fears rose in his throat, and gave him the lie
direct by stopping his utterance.

"Pray don't trouble yourself to explain," said Captain Wragge,
coming to the rescue. "This is the common story, Mr. Vanstone.
Here is a woman who has grown old in your service, and in your
father's service before you; a woman who has contrived, in all
sorts of small, underhand ways, to presume systematically on her
position for years and years past; a woman, in short, whom your
inconsiderate but perfectly natural kindness has allowed to claim
a right of property in you -- "

"Property!" cried Noel Vanstone, mistaking the captain, and
letting the truth escape him through sheer inability to conceal
his fears any longer. "I don't know what amount of property she
won't claim. She'll make me pay for my father as well as for
myself. Thousands, Mr. Bygrave -- thousands of pounds sterling
out of my pocket!!!" He clasped his hands in despair at the
picture of pecuniary compulsion which his fancy had conjured up
-- his own golden life-blood spouting from him in great jets of
prodigality, under the lancet of Mrs. Lecount.

"Gently, Mr. Vanstone -- gently! The woman knows nothing so far,
and the money is not gone yet."

"No, no; the money is not gone, as you say. I'm only nervous
about it; I can't help being nervous. You were saying something
just now; you were going to give me advice. I value your advice;
you don't know how highly I value your advice." He said those
words with a conciliatory smile which was more than helpless; it
was absolutely servile in its dependence on his judicious friend.

"I was only assuring you, my dear sir, that I understood your
position," said the captain. "I see your difficulty as plainly as
you can see it yourself. Tell a woman like Mrs. Lecount that she
must come off her domestic throne, to make way for a young and
beautiful successor, armed with the authority of a wife, and an
unpleasant scene must be the inevitable result. An unpleasant
scene, Mr. Vanstone, if your opinion of your housekeeper's sanity
is well founded. Something far more serious, if my opinion that
her intellect is unsettled happens to turn out the right one."

"I don't say it isn't my opinion, too," rejoined Noel Vanstone.
"Especially after what has happened to-day."

Captain Wragge immediately begged to know what the event alluded
to might be.

Noel Vanstone thereupon explained -- with an infinite number of
parentheses all referring to himself -- that Mrs. Lecount had put
the dreaded question relating to the little note in her master's
pocket barely an hour since. He had answered her inquiry as Mr.
Bygrave had advised him. On hearing that the accuracy of the
personal description had been fairly put to the test, and had
failed in the one important particular of the moles on the neck,
Mrs. Lecount had considered a little, and had then asked him
whether he had shown her note to Mr. Bygrave before the
experiment was tried. He had answered in the negative, as the
only safe form of reply that he could think of on the spur of the
moment, and the housekeeper had then addressed him in these
strange and startling words: "You are keeping the truth from me,
Mr. Noel. You are trusting strangers, and doubting your old
servant and your old friend. Every time you go to Mr. Bygrave's
house, every time you see Miss Bygrave, you are drawing nearer
and nearer to your destruction. They have got the bandage over
your eyes in spite of me; but I tell them, and tell you, before
many days are over I will take it off!" To this extraordinary
outbreak -- accompanied as it was by an expression in Mrs.
Lecount's face which he had never seen there before -- Noel
Vanstone had made no reply. Mr. Bygrave's  conviction that there
was a lurking taint of insanity in the hou sekeeper's blood had
recurred to his memory, and he had left the room at the first
opportun ity.

Captain Wragge listened with the closest attention to the
narrative thus presented to him. But one conclusion could be
drawn from it -- it was a plain warning to him to hasten the end.

"I am not surprised," he said, gravely, "to hear that you are
inclining more favorably to my opinion. After what you have just
told me, Mr. Vanstone, no sensible man could do otherwise. This
is becoming serious. I hardly know what results may not be
expected to follow the communication of your approaching change
in life to Mrs. Lecount. My niece may be involved in those
results. She is nervous; she is sensitive in the highest degree;
she is the innocent object of this woman's unreasoning hatred and
distrust. You alarm me, sir! I am not easily thrown off my
balance, but I acknowledge you alarm me for the future." He
frowned, shook his head, and looked at his visitor despondently.

Noel Vanstone began to feel uneasy. The change in Mr. Bygrave's
manner seemed ominous of a reconsideration of his proposals from
a new and unfavorable point of view. He took counsel of his
inborn cowardice and his inborn cunning, and proposed a solution
of the difficulty discovered by himself.

"Why should we tell Lecount at all?" he asked. "What right has
Lecount to know? Can't we be married without letting her into the
secret? And can't somebody tell her afterward when we are both
out of her reach?"

Captain Wragge received this proposal with an expression of
surprise which did infinite credit to his power of control over
his own countenance. His foremost object throughout the interview
had been to conduct it to this point, or, in other words, to make
the first idea of keeping the marriage a secret from Mrs. Lecount
emanate from Noel Vanstone instead of from himself. No one knew
better than the captain that the only responsibilities which a
weak man ever accepts are responsibilities which can be
perpetually pointed out to him as resting exclusively on his own
shoulders.

"I am accustomed to set my face against clandestine proceedings
of all kinds," said Captain Wragge. "But there are exceptions to
the strictest rules; and I am bound to admit, Mr. Vanstone, that
your position in this matter is an exceptional position, if ever
there was one yet. The course you have just proposed -- however
unbecoming I may think it, however distasteful it may be to
myself -- would not only spare you a very serious embarrassment
(to say the least of it), but would also protect you from the
personal assertion of those pecuniary claims on the part of your
housekeeper to which you have already adverted. These are both
desirable results to achieve -- to say nothing of the removal, on
my side, of all apprehension of annoyance to my niece. On the
other hand, however, a marriage solemnized with such privacy as
you propose must be a hasty marriage; for, as we are situated,
the longer the delay the greater will be the risk that our secret
may escape our keeping. I am not against hasty marriages where a
mutual flame is fanned by an adequate income. My own was a
love-match contracted in a hurry. There are plenty of instances
in the experience of every one, of short courtships and speedy
marriages, which have turned up trumps -- I beg your pardon --
which have turned out well after all. But if you and my niece,
Mr. Vanstone, are to add one to the number of these eases, the
usual preliminaries of marriage among the higher classes must be
hastened by some means. You doubtless understand me as now
referring to the subject of settlements."

"I'll take another teaspoonful of brandy," said Noel Vanstone,
holding out his glass with a trembling hand as the word
"settlements" passed Captain Wragge's lips.

"I'll take a teaspoonful with you," said the captain, nimbly
dismounting from the pedestal of his respectability, and sipping
his brandy with the highest relish. Noel Vanstone, after
nervously following his host's example, composed himself to meet
the coming ordeal, with reclining head and grasping hands, in the
position familiarly associated to all civilized humanity with a
seat in a dentist's chair.

The captain put down his empty glass and got up again on his
pedestal.

"We were talking of settlements," he resumed. "I have already
mentioned, Mr. Vanstone, at an early period of our conversation,
that my niece presents the man of her choice with no other dowry
than the most inestimable of all gifts -- the gift of herself.
This circumstance, however (as you are no doubt aware), does not
disentitle me to make the customary stipulations with her future
husband. According to the usual course in this matter, my lawyer
would see yours -consultations would take place -- delays would
occur -- strangers would be in possession of your intentions --
and Mrs. Lecount would, sooner or later, arrive at that knowledge
of the truth which you are anxious to keep from her. Do you agree
with me so far?"

Unutterable apprehension closed Noel Vanstone's lips. He could
only reply by an inclination of the head.

"Very good," said the captain. "Now, sir, you may possibly have
observed that I am a man of a very original turn of mind. If I
have not hitherto struck you in that light, it may then be
necessary to mention that there are some subjects on which I
persist in thinking for myself. The subject of marriage
settlements is one of them. What, let me ask you, does a parent
or guardian in my present condition usually do? After having
trusted the man whom he has chosen for his son-in-law with the
sacred deposit of a woman's happiness, he turns round on that
man, and declines to trust him with the infinitely inferior
responsibility of providing for her pecuniary future. He fetters
his son-in-law with the most binding document the law can
produce, and employs with the husband of his own child the same
precautions which he would use if he were dealing with a stranger
and a rogue. I call such conduct as this inconsistent and
unbecoming in the last degree. You will not find it my course of
conduct, Mr. Vanstone -- you will not find me preaching what I
don't practice. If I trust you with my niece, I trust you with
every inferior responsibility toward her and toward me. Give me
your hand, sir; tell me, on your word of honor, that you will
provide for your wife as becomes her position and your means, and
the question of settlements is decided between us from this
moment at once and forever!" Having carried out Magdalen's
instructions in this lofty tone, he threw open his respectable
frockcoat, and sat with head erect and hand extended, the model
of parental feeling and the picture of human integrity.

For one moment Noel Vanstone remained literally petrified by
astonishment. The, next, he started from his chair and wrung the
hand of his magnanimous friend in a perfect transport of
admiration. Never yet, throughout his long and varied career, had
Captain Wragge felt such difficulty in keeping his countenance as
he felt now. Contempt for the outburst of miserly gratitude of
which he was the object; triumph in the sense of successful
conspiracy against a man who had rated the offer of his
protection at five pounds; regret at the lost opportunity of
effecting a fine stroke of moral agriculture, which his dread of
involving himself in coming consequences had forced him to let
slip -- all these varied emotions agitated the captain's mind;
all strove together to find their way to the surface through the
outlets of his face or his tongue. He allowed Noel Vanstone to
keep possession of his hand, and to heap one series of shrill
protestations and promises on another, until he had regained his
usual mastery over himself. That result achieved, he put the
little man back in his chair, and returned forthwith to the
subject of Mrs. Lecount.

"Suppose we now revert to the difficulty which we have not
conquered yet," said the captain. "Let us say that I do violence
to my own habits and feelings; that I allow the considerations I
have already mentioned to weigh with me; and that I sanction your
wish to be united to my niece without the knowledge of Mrs.
Lecount. Allow  me to inquire in that case what means you can
suggest for the accomplishment of your end?"

"I can't suggest anything," replied Noel Vanstone, helplessly.
"Would you object to suggest for me?"

"You are making a bolder request than you think, Mr. Vanstone. I
never do things by halves. When I am acting with my customary
candor, I am frank (as you know already) to the utmost verge of
imprudence. When exceptional circumstances compel me to take an
opposite course, there isn't a slyer fox alive than I am. If, at
your express request, I take off my honest English coat here and
put on a Jesuit's gown -- if, purely out of sympathy for your
awkward position, I consent to keep your secret for you from Mrs.
Lecount -- I must have no unseasonable scruples to contend with
on your part. If it is neck or nothing on my side, sir, it must
be neck or nothing on yours also."

"Neck or nothing, by all means," said Noel Vanstone, briskly --
"on the understanding that you go first. I have no scruples about
keeping Lecount in the dark. But she is devilish cunning, Mr.
Bygrave. How is it to be done?"

"You shall hear directly," replied the captain. "Before I develop
my views, I should like to have your opinion on an abstract
question of morality. What do you think, my dear sir, of pious
frauds in general?"

Noel Vanstone looked a little embarrassed by the question.

"Shall I put it more plainly?" continued Captain Wragge. "What do
you say to the universally-accepted maxim that 'all stratagems
are fair in love and war'? -Yes or No?"

"Yes!" answered Noel Vanstone, with the utmost readiness.

"One more question and I have done," said the captain. "Do you
see any particular objection to practicing a pious fraud on Mrs.
Lecount?"

Noel Vanstone's resolution began to falter a little.

"Is Lecount likely to find it out?" he asked cautiously.

"She can't possibly discover it until you are married and out of
her reach."

"You are sure of that?"

"Quite sure."

"Play any trick you like on Lecount," said Noel Vanstone, with an
air of unutterable relief. "I have had my suspicions lately that
she is trying to domineer over me; I am beginning to feel that I
have borne with Lecount long enough. I wish I was well rid of
her."

"You shall have your wish," said Captain Wragge. "You shall be
rid of her in a week or ten days."

Noel Vanstone rose eagerly and approached the captain's chair.

"You don't say so!" he exclaimed. "How do you mean to send her
away?"

"I mean to send her on a journey," replied Captain Wragge.

"Where?"

"From your house at Aldborough to her brother's bedside at
Zurich."

Noel Vanstone started back at the answer, and returned suddenly
to his chair.

"How can you do that?" he inquired, in the greatest perplexity.
"Her brother (hang him!) is much better. She had another letter
from Zurich to say so, this morning."

"Did you see the letter?"

"Yes. She always worries about her brother -- she _would_ show it
to me."

"Who was it from? and what did it say?"

"It was from the doctor -- he always writes to her. I don't care
two straws about her brother, and I don't remember much of the
letter, except that it was a short one. The fellow was much
better; and if the doctor didn't write again, she might take it
for granted that he was getting well. That was the substance of
it."

"Did you notice where she put the letter when you gave it her
back again?"

"Yes. She put it in the drawer where she keeps her
account-books."

"Can you get at that drawer?"

"Of course I can. I have got a duplicate key -- I always insist
on a duplicate key of the place where she keeps her account
books. I never allow the account-books to be locked up from my
inspection: it's a rule of the house."

"Be so good as to get that letter to-day, Mr. Vanstone, without
your housekeeper's knowledge, and add to the favor by letting me
have it here privately for an hour or two."

"What do you want it for?"

"I have some more questions to ask before I tell you. Have you
any intimate friend at Zurich whom you could trust to help you in
playing a trick on Mrs. Lecount?"

"What sort of help do you mean?" asked Noel Vanstone.

"Suppose," said the captain, "you were to send a letter addressed
to Mrs. Lecount at Aldborough, inclosed in another letter
addressed to one of your friends abroad? And suppose you were to
instruct that friend to help a harmless practical joke by posting
Mrs. Lecount's letter at Zurich? Do you know any one who could be
trusted to do that?"

"I know two people who could be trusted!" cried Noel Vanstone.
"Both ladies -both spinsters -- both bitter enemies of Lecount's.
But what is your drift, Mr. Bygrave? Though I am not usually
wanting in penetration, I don't altogether see your drift."

"You shall see it directly, Mr. Vanstone."

With those words he rose, withdrew to his desk in the corner of
the room, and wrote a few lines on a sheet of note-paper. After
first reading them carefully to himself, he beckoned to Noel
Vanstone to come and read them too.

"A few minutes since," said the captain, pointing complacently to
his own composition with the feather end of his pen, "I had the
honor of suggesting a pious fraud on Mrs. Lecount. There it is!"

He resigned his chair at the writing-table to his visitor. Noel
Vanstone sat down, and read these lines:

MY DEAR MADAM -- Since I last wrote, I deeply regret to inform
you that your brother has suffered a relapse. The symptoms are so
serious, that it is my painful duty to summon you instantly to
his bedside. I am making every effort to resist the renewed
progress of the malady, and I have not yet lost all hope of
success. But I cannot reconcile it to my conscience to leave you
in ignorance of a serious change in my patient for the worse,
which _may_ be attended by fatal results. With much sympathy, I
remain, etc. etc."

Captain Wragge waited with some anxiety for the effect which this
letter might produce. Mean, selfish, and cowardly as he was, even
Noel Vanstone might feel some compunction at practicing such a
deception as was here suggested on a woman who stood toward him
in the position of Mrs. Lecount. She had served him faithfully,
however interested her motives might be -- she had lived since he
was a lad in the full possession of his father's confidence --
she was living now under the protection of his own roof. Could be
fail to remember this; and, remembering it, could he lend his aid
without hesitation to the scheme which was now proposed to him?
Captain Wragge unconsciously retained belief enough in human
nature to doubt it. To his surprise, and, it must be added, to
his relief, also, his apprehensions proved to be groundless. The
only emotions aroused in Noel Vanstone's mind by a perusal of the
letter were a hearty admiration of his friend's idea, and a
vainglorious anxiety to claim the credit to himself of being the
person who carried it out. Examples may be found every day of a
fool who is no coward; examples may be found occasionally of a
fool who is not cunning; but it may reasonably be doubted whether
there is a producible instance anywhere of a fool who is not
cruel.

"Perfect!" cried Noel Vanstone, clapping his hands. "Mr. Bygrave,
you are as good as Figaro in the French comedy. Talking of
French, there is one serious mistake in this clever letter of
yours -- it is written in the wrong language. When the doctor
writes to Lecount, he writes in French. Perhaps you meant me to
translate it? You can't manage without my help, can you? I write
French as fluently as I write English. Just look at me! I'll
translate it, while I sit here, in two strokes of the pen."

He completed the translation almost as rapidly as Captain Wragge
had produced the original. "Wait a minute!" he cried, in high
critical triumph at discovering another defect in the composition
of his ingenious friend. "The doctor always dates his letters.
Here is no date to yours."

"I leave the date to you," said the captain, with a sardonic
smile. "You have discovered the fault, my dear sir -- pray
correct it!"

Noel Vanstone mentally looked into the great gulf which separates
the faculty that can discover a defect, from the faculty that can
apply a remedy, and,  following the example  of many a wiser man,
declined to cross over it.

"I couldn't think of ta king the liberty," he said, politely.
"Perhaps you had a motive for leaving the date out?"

"Perhaps I had," replied Captain Wragge, with his easiest
good-humor. "The date must depend on the time a letter takes to
get to Zurich. _I_ have had no experience on that point -- _you_
must have had plenty of experience in your father's time. Give me
the benefit of your information, and we will add the date before
you leave the writing-table."

Noel Vanstone's experience was, as Captain Wragge had
anticipated, perfectly competent to settle the question of time.
The railway resources of the Continent (in the year eighteen
hundred and forty-seven) were but scanty; and a letter sent at
that period from England to Zurich, and from Zurich back again to
England, occupied ten days in making the double journey by post.

"Date the letter in French five days on from to-morrow," said the
captain, when he had got his information. "Very good. The next
thing is to let me have the doctor's note as soon as you can. I
may be obliged to practice some hours before I can copy your
translation in an exact imitation of the doctor's handwriting.
Have you got any foreign note-paper? Let me have a few sheets,
and send, at the same time, an envelope addressed to one of those
lady-friends of yours at Zurich, accompanied by the necessary
request to post the inclosure. This is all I need trouble you to
do, Mr. Vanstone. Don't let me seem inhospitable; but the sooner
you can supply me with my materials, the better I shall be
pleased. We entirely understand each other, I suppose? Having
accepted your proposal for my niece's hand, I sanction a private
marriage in consideration of the circumstances on your side. A
little harmless stratagem is necessary to forward your views. I
invent the stratagem at your request, and you make use of it
without the least hesitation. The result is, that in ten days
from to-morrow Mrs. Lecount will be on her way to Switzerland; in
fifteen days from to-morrow Mrs. Lecount will reach Zurich, and
discover the trick we have played her; in twenty days from
to-morrow Mrs. Lecount will be back at Aldborough, and will find
her master's wedding-cards on the table, and her master himself
away on his honey-moon trip. I put it arithmetically, for the
sake of putting it plain. God bless you. Good-morning!"

"I suppose I may have the happiness of seeing Miss Bygrave
to-morrow?" said Noel Vanstone, turning round at the door.

"We must be careful," replied Captain Wragge. "I don't forbid
to-morrow, but I make no promise beyond that. Permit me to remind
you that we have got Mrs. Lecount to manage for the next ten
days."

"I wish Lecount was at the bottom of the German Ocean!" exclaimed
Noel Vanstone, fervently. "It's all very well for you to manage
her -- you don't live in the house. What am I to do?"

"I'll tell you to-morrow," said the captain. "Go out for your
walk alone, and drop in here, as you dropped in to-day, at two
o'clock. In the meantime, don't forget those things I want you to
send me. Seal them up together in a large envelope. When you have
done that, ask Mrs. Lecount to walk out with you as usual; and
while she is upstairs putting her bonnet on, send the servant
across to me. You understand? Good-morning.

"An hour afterward, the sealed envelope, with its inclosures,
reached Captain Wragge in perfect safety. The double task of
exactly imitating a strange handwriting, and accurately copying
words written in a language with which he was but slightly
acquainted, presented more difficulties to be overcome than the
captain had anticipated. It was eleven o'clock before the
employment which he had undertaken was successfully completed,
and the letter to Zurich ready for the post.

Before going to bed, he walked out on the deserted Parade to
breathe the cool night air. All the lights were extinguished in
Sea-view Cottage, when he looked that way, except the light in
the housekeeper's window. Captain Wragge shook his head
suspiciously. He had gained experience enough by this time to
distrust the wakefulness of Mrs. Lecount.

CHAPTER IX.

IF Captain Wragge could have looked into Mrs. Lecount's room
while he stood on the Parade watching the light in her window, he
would have seen the housekeeper sitting absorbed in meditation
over a worthless little morsel of brown stuff which lay on her
toilet-table.

However exasperating to herself the conclusion might be, Mrs.
Lecount could not fail to see that she had been thus far met and
baffled successfully at every point. What was she to do next? If
she sent for Mr. Pendril when he came to Aldborough (with only a
few hours spared from his business at her disposal), what
definite course would there be for him to follow? If she showed
Noel Vanstone the original letter from which her note had been
copied, he would apply instantly to the writer for an
explanation: would expose the fabricated story by which Mrs.
Lecount had succeeded in imposing on Miss Garth; and would, in
any event, still declare, on the evidence of his own eyes, that
the test by the marks on the neck had utterly failed. Miss
Vanstone, the elder, whose unexpected presence at Aldborough
might have done wonders -- whose voice in the hall at North
Shingles, even if she had been admitted no further, might have
reached her sister's ears and led to instant results -- Miss
Vanstone, the elder, was out of the country, and was not likely
to return for a month at least. Look as anxiously as Mrs. Lecount
might along the course which she had hitherto followed, she
failed to see her way through the accumulated obstacles which now
barred her advance.

Other women in this position might have waited until
circumstances altered, and helped them. Mrs. Lecount boldly
retraced her steps, and determined to find her way to her end in
a new direction. Resigning for the present all further attempt to
prove that the false Miss Bygrave was the true Magdalen Vanstone,
she resolved to narrow the range of her next efforts; to leave
the actual question of Magdalen's identity untouched; and to rest
satisfied with convincing her master of this simple fact -- that
the young lady who was charming him at North Shingles, and the
disguised woman who had terrified him in Vauxhall Walk, were one
and the same person.

The means of effecting this new object were, to all appearance,
far less easy of attainment than the means of effecting the
object which Mrs. Lecount had just resigned. Here no help was to
be expected from others, no ostensibly benevolent motives could
be put forward as a blind -- no appeal could be made to Mr.
Pendril or to Miss Garth. Here the housekeeper's only chance of
success depended, in the first place, on her being able to effect
a stolen entrance into Mr. Bygrave's house, and, in the second
place, on her ability to discover whether that memorable alpaca
dress from which she had secretly cut the fragment of stuff
happened to form part of Miss Bygrave's wardrobe.

Taking the difficulties now before her in their order as they
occurred, Mrs. Lecount first resolved to devote the next few days
to watching the habits of the inmates of North Shingles, from
early in the morning to late at night, and to testing the
capacity of the one servant in the house to resist the temptation
of a bribe. Assuming that results proved successful, and that,
either by money or by stratagem, she gained admission to North
Shingles (without the knowledge of Mr. Bygrave or his niece), she
turned next to the second difficulty of the two -- the difficulty
of obtaining access to Miss Bygrave's wardrobe.

If the servant proved corruptible, all obstacles in this
direction might be considered as removed beforehand. But if the
servant proved honest, the new problem was no easy one to solve.

Long and careful consideration of the question led the
housekeeper at last to the bold resolution of obtaining an
interview -- if the servant failed her -with Mrs. Bygrave
herself. What was the true cause of this lady's mysterious
seclusion? Was she a person of the strictest and the most
inconvenient integrity? or a perso n who could not be depended on
to preserve a secret? or a person who was as artful as Mr. Bygrav
e himself, and who was kept in reserve to forward the object of
some new deception which was yet to come? In the first two cases,
Mrs. Lecount could trust in her own powers of dissimulation, and
in the results which they might achieve. In the last case (if no
other end was gained), it might be of vital importance to her to
discover an enemy hidden in the dark. In any event, she
determined to run the risk. Of the three chances in her favor on
which she had reckoned at the outset of the struggle -- the
chance of entrapping Magdalen by word of mouth, the chance of
entrapping her by the help of her friends, and the chance of
entrapping her by means of Mrs. Bygrave -- two had been tried,
and two had failed. The third remained to be tested yet; and the
third might succeed.

So, the captain's enemy plotted against him in the privacy of her
own chamber, while the captain watched the light in her window
from the beach outside.

Before breakfast the next morning, Captain Wragge posted the
forged letter to Zurich with his own hand. He went back to North
Shingles with his mind not quite decided on the course to take
with Mrs. Lecount during the all-important interval of the next
ten days.

Greatly to his surprise, his doubts on this point were abruptly
decided by Magdalen herself.

He found her waiting for him in the room where the breakfast was
laid. She was walking restlessly to and fro, with her head
drooping on her bosom and her hair hanging disordered over her
shoulders. The moment she looked up on his entrance, the captain
felt the fear which Mrs. Wragge had felt before him -- the fear
that her mind would be struck prostrate again, as it had been
struck once already, when Frank's letter reached her in Vauxhall
Walk.

"Is he coming again to-day?" she asked, pushing away from her the
chair which Captain Wragge offered, with such violence that she
threw it on the floor.

"Yes," said the captain, wisely answering her in the fewest
words. "He is coming at two o'clock."

"Take me away!" she exclaimed, tossing her hair back wildly from
her face. "Take me away before he comes. I can't get over the
horror of marrying him while I am in this hateful place; take me
somewhere where I can forget it, or I shall go mad! Give me two
days' rest -- two days out of sight of that horrible sea -- two
days out of prison in this horrible house -- two days anywhere in
the wide world away from Aldborough. I'll come back with you!
I'll go through with it to the end! Only give me two days' escape
from that man and everything belonging to him! Do you hear, you
villain?" she cried, seizing his arm and shaking it in a frenzy
of passion; "I have been tortured enough -- I can bear it no
longer!"

There was but one way of quieting her, and the captain instantly
took it.

"If you will try to control yourself," he said, "you shall leave
Aldborough in an hour's time."

She dropped his arm, and leaned back heavily against the wall
behind her.

"I'll try," she answered, struggling for breath, but looking at
him less wildly. "You shan't complain of me, if I can help it."
She attempted confusedly to take her handkerchief from her apron
pocket, and failed to find it. The captain took it out for her.
Her eyes softened, and she drew her breath more freely as she
received the handkerchief from him. "You are a kinder man than I
thought you were," she said; "I am sorry I spoke so passionately
to you just now -- I am very, very sorry." The tears stole into
her eyes, and she offered him her hand with the native grace and
gentleness of happier days. "Be friends with me again," she said,
pleadingly. "I'm only a girl, Captain Wragge -- I'm only a girl!"

He took her hand in silence, patted it for a moment, and then
opened the door for her to go back to her own room again. There
was genuine regret in his face as he showed her that trifling
attention. He was a vagabond and a cheat; he had lived a mean,
shuffling, degraded life, but he was human; and she had found her
way to the lost sympathies in him which not even the
self-profanation of a swindler's existence could wholly destroy.
"Damn the breakfast!" he said, when the servant came in for her
orders. "Go to the inn directly, and say I want a carriage and
pair at the door in an hour's time." He went out into the
passage, still chafing under a sense of mental disturbance which
was new to him, and shouted to his wife more fiercely than ever
-- "Pack up what we want for a week's absence, and be ready in
half an hour!" Having issued those directions, he returned to the
breakfast-room, and looked at the half-spread table with an
impatient wonder at his disinclination to do justice to his own
meal. "She has rubbed off the edge of my appetite," he said to
himself, with a forced laugh. "I'll try a cigar, and a turn in
the fresh air."

If he had been twenty years younger, those remedies might have
failed him. But where is the man to be found whose internal
policy succumbs to revolution when that man is on the wrong side
of fifty? Exercise and change of place gave the captain back into
the possession of himself. He recovered the lost sense of the
flavor of his cigar, and recalled his wandering attention to the
question of his approaching absence from Aldborough. A few
minutes' consideration satisfied his mind that Magdalen's
outbreak had forced him to take the course of all others which,
on a fair review of existing emergencies, it was now most
desirable to adopt.

Captain Wragge's inquiries on the evening when he and Magdalen
had drunk tea at Sea View had certainly informed him that the
housekeeper's brother possessed a modest competence; that his
sister was his nearest living relative; and that there were some
unscrupulous cousins on the spot who were anxious to usurp the
place in his will which properly belonged to Mrs. Lecount. Here
were strong motives to take the housekeeper to Zurich when the
false report of her brother's relapse reached England. But if any
idea of Noel Vanstone's true position dawned on her in the
meantime, who could say whether she might not, at the eleventh
hour, prefer asserting her large pecuniary interest in her
master, to defending her small pecuniary interest at her
brother's bedside? While that question remained undecided, the
plain necessity of checking the growth of Noel Vanstone's
intimacy with the family at North Shingles did not admit of a
doubt; and of all means of effecting that object, none could be
less open to suspicion than the temporary removal of the
household from their residence at Aldborough. Thoroughly
satisfied with the soundness of this conclusion, Captain Wragge
made straight for Sea-view Cottage, to apologize and explain
before the carriage came and the departure took place.

Noel Vanstone was easily accessible to visitors; he was walking
in the garden before breakfast. His disappointment and vexation
were freely expressed when he heard the news which his friend had
to communicate. The captain's fluent tongue, however, soon
impressed on him the necessity of resignation to present
circumstances. The bare hint that the "pious fraud" might fail
after all, if anything happened in the ten days' interval to
enlighten Mrs. Lecount, had an instant effect in making Noel
Vanstone as patient and as submissive as could be wished.

"I won't tell you where we are going, for two good reasons," said
Captain Wragge, when his preliminary explanations were completed.
"In the first place, I haven't made up my mind yet; and, in the
second place, if you don't know where our destination is, Mrs.
Lecount can't worm it out of you. I have not the least doubt she
is watching us at this moment from behind her window-curtain.
When she asks what I wanted with you this morning, tell her I
came to say good-by for a few days, finding my niece not so well
again, and wishing to take her on a short visit to some friends
to try change of air. If you could produce an impression on Mrs.
Lecount's mind (without overdoing it), that you are a little
disappointed in me, and that you are rather inclined to doubt my
heartiness in cultivating your acq uaintance, you will greatly
help our present object. You may depend on our return to North
Shin gles in four or five days at furthest. If anything strikes
me in the meanwhile, the post is always at our service, and I
won't fail to write to you."

"Won't Miss Bygrave write to me?" inquired Noel Vanstone,
piteously. "Did she know you were coming here? Did she send me no
message?"

"Unpardonable on my part to have forgotten it!" cried the
captain. "She sent you her love."

Noel Vanstone closed his eyes in silent ecstasy.

When he opened them again Captain Wragge had passed through the
garden gate and was on his way back to North Shingles. As soon as
his own door had closed on him, Mrs. Lecount descended from the
post of observation which the captain had rightly suspected her
of occupying, and addressed the inquiry to her master which the
captain had rightly foreseen would follow his departure. The
reply she received produced but one impression on her mind. She
at once set it down as a falsehood, and returned to her own
window to keep watch over North Shingles more vigilantly than
ever.

To her utter astonishment, after a lapse of less than half an
hour she saw an empty carriage draw up at Mr. Bygrave's door.
Luggage was brought out and packed on the vehicle. Miss Bygrave
appeared, and took her seat in it. She was followed into the
carriage by a lady of great size and stature, whom the
housekeeper conjectured to be Mrs. Bygrave. The servant came
next, and stood waiting on the path. The last person to appear
was Mr. Bygrave. He locked the house door, and took the key away
with him to a cottage near at hand, which was the residence of
the landlord of North Shingles. On his return, he nodded to the
servant, who walked away by herself toward the humbler quarter of
the little town, and joined the ladies in the carriage. The
coachman mounted the box, and the vehicle disappeared.

Mrs. Lecount laid down the opera-glass, through which she had
been closely investigating these proceedings, with a feeling of
helpless perplexity which she was almost ashamed to acknowledge
to herself. The secret of Mr. Bygrave's object in suddenly
emptying his house at Aldborough of every living creature in it
was an impenetrable mystery to her.

Submitting herself to circumstances with a ready resignation
which Captain Wragge had not shown, on his side, in a similar
situation, Mrs. Lecount wasted neither time nor temper in
unprofitable guess-work. She left the mystery to thicken or to
clear, as the future might decide, and looked exclusively at the
uses to which she might put the morning's event in her own
interests. Whatever might have become of the family at North
Shingles, the servant was left behind, and the servant was
exactly the person whose assistance might now be of vital
importance to the housekeeper's projects. Mrs. Lecount put on her
bonnet, inspected the collection of loose silver in her purse,
and set forth on the spot to make the servant's acquaintance.

She went first to the cottage at which Mr. Bygrave had left the
key of North Shingles, to discover the servant's present address
from the landlord. So far as this object was concerned, her
errand proved successful. The landlord knew that the girl had
been allowed to go home for a few days to her friends, and knew
in what part of Aldborough her friends lived. But here his
sources of information suddenly dried up. He knew nothing of the
destination to which Mr. Bygrave and his family had betaken
themselves, and he was perfectly ignorant of the number of days
over which their absence might be expected to extend. All he
could say was, that he had not received a notice to quit from his
tenant, and that he had been requested to keep the key of the
house in his possession until Mr. Bygrave returned to claim it in
his own person.

Baffled, but not discouraged, Mrs. Lecount turned her steps next
toward the back street of Aldborough, and astonished the
servant's relatives by conferring on them the honor of a morning
call.

Easily imposed on at starting by Mrs. Lecount's pretense of
calling to engage her, under the impression that she had left Mr.
Bygrave's service, the servant did her best to answer the
questions put to her. But she knew as little as the landlord of
her master's plans. All she could say about them was, that she
had not been dismissed, and that she was to await the receipt of
a note recalling her when necessary to her situation at North
Shingles. Not having expected to find her better informed on this
part of the subject, Mrs. Lecount smoothly shifted her ground,
and led the woman into talking generally of the advantages and
defects of her situation in Mr. Bygrave's family.

Profiting by the knowledge gained, in this indirect manner, of
the little secrets of the household, Mrs. Lecount made two
discoveries. She found out, in the first place, that the servant
(having enough to do in attending to the coarser part of the
domestic work) was in no position to disclose the secrets of Miss
Bygrave's wardrobe, which were known only to the young lady
herself and to her aunt. In the second place, the housekeeper
ascertained that the true reason of Mrs. Bygrave's rigid
seclusion was to be found in the simple fact that she was little
better than an idiot, and that her husband was probably ashamed
of allowing her to be seen in public. These apparently trivial
discoveries enlightened Mrs. Lecount on a very important point
which had been previously involved in doubt. She was now
satisfied that the likeliest way to obtaining a private
investigation of Magdalen's wardrobe lay through deluding the
imbecile lady, and not through bribing the ignorant servant.

Having reached that conclusion -- pregnant with coming assaults
on the weakly-fortified discretion of poor Mrs. Wragge -- the
housekeeper cautiously abstained from exhibiting herself any
longer under an inquisitive aspect. She changed the conversation
to local topics, waited until she was sure of leaving an
excellent impression behind her, and then took her leave.

Three days passed; and Mrs. Lecount and her master -- each with
their widely-different ends in view -- watched with equal anxiety
for the first signs of returning life in the direction of North
Shingles. In that interval, no letter either from the uncle or
the niece arrived for Noel Vanstone. His sincere feeling of
irritation under this neglectful treatment greatly assisted the
effect of those feigned doubts on the subject of his absent
friends which the captain had recommended him to express in the
housekeeper's presence. He confessed his apprehensions of having
been mistaken, not in Mr. Bygrave only, but even in his niece as
well, with such a genuine air of annoyance that he actually
contributed a new element of confusion to the existing
perplexities of Mrs. Lecount.

On the morning of the fourth day Noel Vanstone met the postman in
the garden; and, to his great relief, discovered among the
letters delivered to him a note from Mr. Bygrave.

The date of the note was "Woodbridge," and it contained a few
lines only. Mr. Bygrave mentioned that his niece was better, and
that she sent her love as before. He proposed returning to
Aldborough on the next day, when he would have some new
considerations of a strictly private nature to present to Mr.
Noel Vanstone's mind. In the meantime he would beg Mr. Vanstone
not to call at North Shingles until he received a special
invitation to do so -- which invitation should certainly be given
on the day when the family returned. The motive of this
apparently strange request should be explained to Mr. Vanstone's
perfect satisfaction when he was once more united to his friends.
Until that period arrived, the strictest caution was enjoined on
him in all his communications with Mrs. Lecount; and the instant
destruction of Mr. Bygrave's letter, after due perusal of it, was
(if the classical phrase might be pardoned) a _sine qua non_.

The fifth day came. Noel Vanstone (after submitting himself to
the _sine qua non_, and destroying the letter) waited anxiously
for results; while Mrs. Lecount, on her side, watched patiently
for events. Toward three o'clock in the afternoon th e carriage
appeared again at the gate of North Shingles. Mr. Bygrave got out
and tripped away briskly to the landlord's cottage for the key.
He returned with the servant at his heels. Miss Bygrave left the
carriage; her giant relative followed her example; the house door
was opened; the trunks were taken off; the carriage disappeared,
and the Bygraves were at home again!

Four o'clock struck, five o'clock, six o'clock, and nothing
happened. In half an hour more, Mr. Bygrave -- spruce, speckless,
and respectable as ever -- appeared on the Parade, sauntering
composedly in the direction of Sea View.

Instead of at once entering the house, he passed it; stopped, as
if struck by a sudden recollection; and, retracing his steps,
asked for Mr. Vanstone at the door. Mr. Vanstone came out
hospitably into the passage. Pitching his voice to a tone which
could be easily heard by any listening individual through any
open door in the bedroom regions, Mr. Bygrave announced the
object of his visit on the door-mat in the fewest possible words.
He had been staying with a distant relative. The distant relative
possessed two pictures -- Gems by the Old Masters -- which he was
willing to dispose of, and which he had intrusted for that
purpose to Mr. Bygrave's care. If Mr. Noel Vanstone, as an
amateur in such matters, wished to see the Gems, they would be
visible in half an hour's time, when Mr. Bygrave would have
returned to North Shingles.

Having delivered himself of this incomprehensible announcement,
the arch-conspirator laid his significant forefinger along the
side of his short Roman nose, said, "Fine weather, isn't it?
Good-afternoon!" and sauntered out inscrutably to continue his
walk on the Parade.

On the expiration of the half-hour Noel Vanstone presented
himself at North Shingles, with the ardor of a lover burning
inextinguishably in his bosom, through the superincumbent mental
fog of a thoroughly bewildered man. To his inexpressible
happiness, he found Magdalen alone in the parlor. Never yet had
she looked so beautiful in his eyes. The rest and relief of her
four days' absence from Aldborough had not failed to produce
their results; she had more than recovered her composure.
Vibrating perpetually from one violent extreme to another, she
had now passed from the passionate despair of five days since to
a feverish exaltation of spirits which defied all remorse and
confronted all consequences. Her eyes sparkled; her cheeks were
bright with color; she talked incessantly, with a forlorn mockery
of the girlish gayety of past days; she laughed with a deplorable
persistency in laughing; she imitated Mrs. Lecount's smooth
voice, and Mrs. Lecount's insinuating graces of manner with an
overcharged resemblance to the original, which was but the coarse
reflection of the delicately-accurate mimicry of former times.
Noel Vanstone, who had never yet seen her as he saw her now, was
enchanted; his weak head whirled with an intoxication of
enjoyment; his wizen cheeks flushed as if they had caught the
infection from hers. The half-hour during which he was alone with
her passed like five minutes to him. When that time had elapsed,
and when she suddenly left him -- to obey a previously-arranged
summons to her aunt's presence -- miser as he was, he would have
paid at that moment five golden sovereigns out of his pocket for
five golden minutes more passed in her society.

The door had hardly closed on Magdalen before it opened again,
and the captain walked in. He entered on the explanations which
his visitor naturally expected from him with the unceremonious
abruptness of a man hard pressed for time, and determined to make
the most of every moment at his disposal.

"Since we last saw each other," he began, "I have been reckoning
up the chances for and against us as we stand at present. The
result on my own mind is this: If you are still at Aldborough
when that letter from Zurich reaches Mrs. Lecount, all the pains
we have taken will have been pains thrown away. If your
housekeeper had fifty brothers all dying together, she would
throw the whole fifty over sooner than leave you alone at Sea
View while we are your neighbors at North Shingles."

Noel Vanstone's flushed cheek turned pale with dismay. His own
knowledge of Mrs. Lecount told him that this view of the case was
the right one.

"If _we_ go away again," proceeded the captain, "nothing will be
gained, for nothing would persuade your housekeeper, in that
case, that we have not left you the means of following us. _You_
must leave Aldborough this time; and, what is more, you must go
without leaving a single visible trace behind you for us to
follow. If we accomplish this object in the course of the next
five days, Mrs. Lecount will take the journey to Zurich. If we
fail, she will be a fixture at Sea View, to a dead certainty.
Don't ask questions! I have got your instructions ready for you,
and I want your closest attention to them. Your marriage with my
niece depends on your not forgetting a word of what I am now
going to tell you. -- One question first. Have you followed my
advice? Have you told Mrs. Lecount you are beginning to think
yourself mistaken in me?"

"I did worse than that," replied Noel Vanstone penitently. "I
committed an outrage on my own feelings. I disgraced myself by
saying that I doubted Miss Bygrave!"

"Go on disgracing yourself, my dear sir! Doubt us both with all
your might, and I'll help you. One question more. Did I speak
loud enough this afternoon? Did Mrs. Lecount hear me?"

"Yes. Lecount opened her door; Lecount heard you. What made you
give me that message? I see no pictures here. Is this another
pious fraud, Mr. Bygrave?"

"Admirably guessed, Mr. Vanstone! You will see the object of my
imaginary picture-dealing in the very next words which I am now
about to address to you. When you get back to Sea View, this is
what you are to say to Mrs. Lecount. Tell her that my relative's
works of Art are two worthless pictures -- copies from the Old
Masters, which I have tried to sell you as originals at an
exorbitant price. Say you suspect me of being little better than
a plausible impostor, and pity my unfortunate niece for being
associated with such a rascal as I am. There is your text to
speak from. Say in many words what I have just said in a few. You
can do that, can't you?"

"Of course I can do it," said Noel Vanstone. "But I can tell you
one thing -Lecount won't believe me."

"Wait a little, Mr. Vanstone; I have not done with my
instructions yet. You understand what I have just told you? Very
good. We may get on from to-day to to-morrow. Go out to-morrow
with Mrs. Lecount at your usual time. I will meet you on the
Parade, and bow to you. Instead of returning my bow, look the
other way. In plain English, cut me! That is easy enough to do,
isn't it?"

"She won't believe me, Mr. Bygrave -- she won't believe me!"

"Wait a little again, Mr. Vanstone. There are more instructions
to come. You have got your directions for to-day, and you have
got your directions for to-morrow. Now for the day after. The day
after is the seventh day since we sent the letter to Zurich. On
the seventh day decline to go out walking as before, from dread
of the annoyance of meeting me again. Grumble about the smallness
of the place; complain of your health; wish you had never come to
Aldborough, and never made acquaintances with the Bygraves; and
when you have well worried Mrs. Lecount with your discontent, ask
her on a sudden if she can't suggest a change for the better. If
you put that question to her naturally, do you think she can be
depended on to answer it?"

"She won't want to be questioned at all," replied Noel Vanstone,
irritably. "I have only got to say I am tired of Aldborough; and,
if she believes me -- which she won't; I'm quite positive, Mr.
Bygrave, she won't! -- she will have her suggestion ready before
I can ask for it."

"Ay! ay!" said the captain eagerly. "There is some place, then,
that Mrs. Lecount wants to go to this autumn?"

"She wants to go there (hang her!) every autumn."

"To go where?"

"To Admiral Bartram's -- you don't know him, do you? -- at St.
Crux-in-the-Marsh."

"Don't lose your patience , Mr. Vanstone! What you are now
telling me is of the most vital importance to the object we ha ve
in view. Who is Admiral Bartram?"

"An old friend of my father's. My father laid him under
obligations -- my father lent him money when they were both young
men. I am like one of the family at St. Crux; my room is always
kept ready for me. Not that there's any family at the admiral's
except his nephew, George Bartram. George is my cousin; I'm as
intimate with George as my father was with the admiral; and I've
been sharper than my father, for I haven't lent my friend any
money. Lecount always makes a show of liking George -- I believe
to annoy me. She likes the admiral, too; he flatters her vanity.
He always invites her to come with me to St. Crux. He lets her
have one of the best bedrooms, and treats her as if she was a
lady. She is as proud as Lucifer -- she likes being treated like
a lady -- and she pesters me every autumn to go to St. Crux.
What's the matter? What are you taking out your pocketbook for?"

"I want the admiral's address, Mr. Vanstone, for a purpose which
I will explain immediately."

With those words, Captain Wragge opened his pocketbook and wrote
down the address from Noel Vanstone's dictation, as follows:
"Admiral Bartram, St. Crux-in-the-Marsh, near Ossory, Essex."

"Good!" cried the captain, closing his pocketbook again. "The
only difficulty that stood in our way is now cleared out of it.
Patience, Mr. Vanstone -patience! Let us take up my instructions
again at the point where we dropped them. Give me five minutes'
more attention, and you will see your way to your marriage as
plainly as I see it. On the day after to-morrow you declare you
are tired of Aldborough, and Mrs. Lecount suggests St. Crux. You
don't say yes or no on the spot; you take the next day to
consider it, and you make up your mind the last thing at night to
go to St. Crux the first thing in the morning. Are you in the
habit of superintending your own packing up, or do you usually
shift all the trouble of it on Mrs. Lecount's shoulders?"

"Lecount has all the trouble, of course; Lecount is paid for it!
But I don't really go, do I?"

"You go as fast as horses can take you to the railway without
having held any previous communication with this house, either
personally or by letter. You leave Mrs. Lecount behind to pack up
your curiosities, to settle with the tradespeople, and to follow
you to St. Crux the next morning. The next morning is the tenth
morning. On the tenth morning she receives the letter from
Zurich; and if you only carry out my instructions, Mr. Vanstone,
as sure as you sit there, to Zurich she goes."

Noel Vanstone's color began to rise again, as the captain's
stratagem dawned on him at last in its true light.

"And what am I to do at St. Crux?" he inquired.

"Wait there till I call for you," replied the captain. "As soon
as Mrs. Lecount's back is turned, I will go to the church here
and give the necessary notice of the marriage. The same day or
the next, I will travel to the address written down in my
pocketbook, pick you up at the admiral's, and take you on to
London with me to get the license. With that document in our
possession, we shall be on our way back to Aldborough while Mrs.
Lecount is on her way out to Zurich; and before she starts on her
return journey, you and my niece will be man and wife! There are
your future prospects for you. What do you think of them?"

"What a head you have got!" cried Noel Vanstone, in a sudden
outburst of enthusiasm. "You're the most extraordinary man I ever
met with. One would think you had done nothing all your life but
take people in."

Captain Wragge received that unconscious tribute to his native
genius with the complacency of a man who felt that he thoroughly
deserved it.

"I have told you already, my dear sir," he said, modestly, "that
I never do things by halves. Pardon me for reminding you that we
have no time for exchanging mutual civilities. Are you quite sure
about your instructions? I dare not write them down for fear of
accidents. Try the system of artificial memory; count your
instructions off after me, on your thumb and your four fingers.
To-day you tell Mrs. Lecount I have tried to take you in with my
relative's works of Art. To-morrow you cut me on the Parade. The
day after you refuse to go out, you get tired of Aldborough, and
you allow Mrs. Lecount to make her suggestion. The next day you
accept the suggestion. And the next day to that you go to St.
Crux. Once more, my dear sir! Thumb -- works of Art. Forefinger
-- cut me on the Parade. Middle finger -- tired of Aldborough.
Third finger -- take Lecount's advice. Little finger -- off to
St. Crux. Nothing can be clearer -nothing can be easier to do. Is
there anything you don't understand? Anything that I can explain
over again before you go?"

"Only one thing," said Noel Vanstone. "Is it settled that I am
not to come here again before I go to St. Crux?"

"Most decidedly!" answered the captain. "The whole success of the
enterprise depends on your keeping away. Mrs. Lecount will try
the credibility of everything you say to her by one test -- the
test of your communicating, or not, with this house. She will
watch you night and day! Don't call here, don't send messages,
don't write letters; don't even go out by yourself. Let her see
you start for St. Crux on her suggestion, with the absolute
certainty in her own mind that you have followed her advice
without communicating it in any form whatever to me or to my
niece. Do that, and she _must_ believe you, on the best of all
evidence for our interests, and the worst for hers -- the
evidence of her own senses."

With those last words of caution, he shook the little man warmly
by the hand and sent him home on the spot.

CHAPTER X.

ON returning to Sea View, Noel Vanstone executed the instructions
which prescribed his line of conduct for the first of the five
days with unimpeachable accuracy. A faint smile of contempt
hovered about Mrs. Lecount's lips while the story of Mr.
Bygrave's attempt to pass off his spurious pictures as originals
was in progress, but she did not trouble herself to utter a
single word of remark when it had come to an end. "Just what I
said!" thought Noel Vanstone, cunningly watching her face; "she
doesn't believe a word of it!"

The next day the meeting occurred on the Parade. Mr. Bygrave took
off his hat, and Noel Vanstone looked the other way. The
captain's start of surprise and scowl of indignation were
executed to perfection, but they plainly failed to impose on Mrs.
Lecount. "I am afraid, sir, you have offended Mr. Bygrave
to-day," she ironically remarked. "Happily for you, he is an
excellent Christian! and I venture to predict that he will
forgive you to-morrow."

Noel Vanstone wisely refrained from committing himself to an
answer. Once more he privately applauded his own penetration;
once more he triumphed over his ingenious friend.

Thus far the captain's instructions had been too clear and simple
to be mistaken by any one. But they advanced in complication with
the advance of time, and on the third day Noel Vanstone fell
confusedly into the commission of a slight error. After
expressing the necessary weariness of Aldborough, and the
consequent anxiety for change of scene, he was met (as he had
anticipated) by an immediate suggestion from the housekeeper,
recommending a visit to St. Crux. In giving his answer to the
advice thus tendered, he made his first mistake. Instead of
deferring his decision until the next day, he accepted Mrs.
Lecount's suggestion on the day when it was offered to him.

The consequences of this error were of no great importance. The
housekeeper merely set herself to watch her master one day
earlier than had been calculated on -- a result which had been
already provided for by the wise precautionary measure of
forbidding Noel Vanstone all communication with North Shingles.
Doubting, as Captain Wragge had foreseen, the sincerity of her
master's desire to break off his connection with the Bygraves by
going to St. Crux, Mrs. Lecount tested the truth or falsehood of
the impression produced on her own mind by vigilantly watching
for sign s of secret communication on one side or on the other.
The close attention with which she had hit herto observed the
out-goings and in-comings at North Shingles was now entirely
transferred to her master. For the rest of that third day she
never let him out of her sight; she never allowed any third
person who came to the house, on any pretense whatever, a
minute's chance of private communication with him. At intervals
through the night she stole to the door of his room, to listen
and assure herself that he was in bed; and before sunrise the
next morning, the coast-guardsman going his rounds was surprised
to see a lady who had risen as early as himself engaged over her
work at one of the upper windows of Sea View.

On the fourth morning Noel Vanstone came down to breakfast
conscious of the mistake that he had committed on the previous
day. The obvious course to take, for the purpose of gaining time,
was to declare that his mind was still undecided. He made the
assertion boldly when the housekeeper asked him if he meant to
move that day. Again Mrs. Lecount offered no remark, and again
the signs and tokens of incredulity showed themselves in her
face. Vacillation of purpose was not at all unusual in her
experience of her master. But on this occasion she believed that
his caprice of conduct was assumed for the purpose of gaining
time to communicate with North Shingles, and she accordingly set
her watch on him once more with doubled and trebled vigilance.

No letters came that morning. Toward noon the weather changed for
the worse, and all idea of walking out as usual was abandoned.
Hour after hour, while her master sat in one of the parlors, Mrs.
Lecount kept watch in the other, with the door into the passage
open, and with a full view of North Shingles through the
convenient side-window at which she had established herself. Not
a sign that was suspicious appeared, not a sound that was
suspicious caught her ear. As the evening closed in, her master's
hesitation came to an end. He was disgusted with the weather; he
hated the place; he foresaw the annoyance of more meetings with
Mr. Bygrave, and he was determined to go to St. Crux the first
thing the next morning. Lecount could stay behind to pack up the
curiosities and settle with the trades-people, and could follow
him to the admiral's on the next day. The housekeeper was a
little staggered by the tone and manner in which he gave these
orders. He had, to her own certain knowledge, effected no
communication of any sort with North Shingles, and yet he seemed
determined to leave Aldborough at the earliest possible
opportunity. For the first time she hesitated in her adherence to
her own conclusions. She remembered that her master had
complained of the Bygraves before they returned to Aldborough;
and she was conscious that her own incredulity had once already
misled her when the appearance of the traveling-carriage at the
door had proved even Mr. Bygrave himself to be as good as his
word.

Still Mrs. Lecount determined to act with unrelenting caution to
the last. That night, when the doors were closed, she privately
removed the keys from the door in front and the door at the back.
She then softly opened her bedroom window and sat down by it,
with her bonnet and cloak on, to prevent her taking cold. Noel
Vanstone's window was on the same side of the house as her own.
If any one came in the dark to speak to him from the garden
beneath, they would speak to his housekeeper as well. Prepared at
all points to intercept every form of clandestine communication
which stratagem could invent, Mrs. Lecount watched through the
quiet night. When morning came, she stole downstairs before the
servant was up, restored the keys to their places, and
re-occupied her position in the parlor until Noel Vanstone made
his appearance at the breakfast-table. Had he altered his mind?
No. He declined posting to the railway on account of the expense,
but he was as firm as ever in his resolution to go to St. Crux.
He desired that an inside place might be secured for him in the
early coach. Suspicious to the last, Mrs. Lecount sent the
baker's man to take the place. He was a public servant, and Mr.
Bygrave would not suspect him of performing a private errand.

The coach called at Sea View. Mrs. Lecount saw her master
established in his place, and ascertained that the other three
inside seats were already occupied by strangers. She inquired of
the coachman if the outside places (all of which were not yet
filled up) had their full complement of passengers also. The man
replied in the affirmative. He had two gentlemen to call for in
the town, and the others would take their places at the inn. Mrs.
Lecount forthwith turned her steps toward the inn, and took up
her position on the Parade opposite from a point of view which
would enable her to see the last of the coach on its departure.
In ten minutes more it rattled away, full outside and in; and the
housekeeper's own eyes assured her that neither Mr. Bygrave
himself, nor any one belonging to North Shingles, was among the
passengers.

There was only one more precaution to take, and Mrs. Lecount did
not neglect it. Mr. Bygrave had doubtless seen the coach call at
Sea View. He might hire a carriage and follow it to the railway
on pure speculation. Mrs. Lecount remained within view of the inn
(the only place at which a carriage could be obtained) for nearly
an hour longer, waiting for events. Nothing happened; no carriage
made its appearance; no pursuit of Noel Vanstone was now within
the range of human possibility. The long strain on Mrs. Lecount's
mind relaxed at last. She left her seat on the Parade, and
returned in higher spirits than usual, to perform the closing
household ceremonies at Sea View.

She sat down alone in the parlor and drew a long breath of
relief. Captain Wragge's calculations had not deceived him. The
evidence of her own senses had at last conquered the
housekeeper's incredulity, and had literally forced her into the
opposite extreme of belief.

Estimating the events of the last three days from her own
experience of them; knowing (as she certainly knew) that the
first idea of going to St. Crux had been started by herself, and
that her master had found no opportunity and shown no inclination
to inform the family at North Shingles that he had accepted her
proposal, Mrs. Lecount was fairly compelled to acknowledge that
not a fragment of foundation remained to justify the continued
suspicion of treachery in her own mind. Looking at the succession
of circumstances under the new light thrown on them by results,
she could see nothing unaccountable, nothing contradictory
anywhere. The attempt to pass off the forged pictures as
originals was in perfect harmony with the character of such a man
as Mr. Bygrave. Her master's indignation at the attempt to impose
on him; his plainly-expressed suspicion that Miss Bygrave was
privy to it; his disappointment in the niece; his contemptuous
treatment of the uncle on the Parade; his weariness of the place
which had been the scene of his rash intimacy with strangers, and
his readiness to quit it that morning, all commended themselves
as genuine realities to the housekeeper's mind, for one
sufficient reason. Her own eyes had seen Noel Vanstone take his
departure from Aldborough without leaving, or attempting to
leave, a single trace behind him for the Bygraves to follow.

Thus far the housekeeper's conclusions led her, but no further.
She was too shrewd a woman to trust the future to chance and
fortune. Her master's variable temper might relent. Accident
might at any time give Mr. Bygrave an opportunity of repairing
the error that he had committed, and of artfully regaining his
lost place in Noel Vanstone's estimation. Admitting that
circumstances had at last declared themselves unmistakably in her
favor, Mrs. Lecount was not the less convinced that nothing would
permanently assure her master's security for the future but the
plain exposure of the conspiracy which she had striven to
accomplish from the first -- which she was resolved to accomplish
still.

"I always enjoy myself at St. Crux," thought Mrs. Lecount,
opening her account-bo oks, and sorting the tradesmen's bills.
"The admiral is a gentleman, the house is noble, the tab le is
excellent. No matter! Here at Sea View I stay by myself till I
have seen the inside of Miss Bygrave's wardrobe."

She packed her master's collection of curiosities in their
various cases, settled the claims of the trades-people, and
superintended the covering of the furniture in the course of the
day. Toward nightfall she went out, bent on investigation, and
ventured into the garden at North Shingles under cover of the
darkness. She saw the light in the parlor window, and the lights
in the windows of the rooms upstairs, as usual. After an
instant's hesitation she stole to the house door, and noiselessly
tried the handle from the outside. It turned the lock as she had
expected, from her experience of houses at Aldborough and at
other watering-places, but the door resisted her; the door was
distrustfully bolted on the inside. After making that discovery,
she went round to the back of the house, and ascertained that the
door on that side was secured in the same manner. "Bolt your
doors, Mr. Bygrave, as fast as you like," said the housekeeper,
stealing back again to the Parade. "You can't bolt the entrance
to your servant's pocket. The best lock you have may be opened by
a golden key."

She went back to bed. The ceaseless watching, the unrelaxing
excitement of the last two days, had worn her out.

The next morning she rose at seven o'clock. In half an hour more
she saw the punctual Mr. Bygrave -- as she had seen him on many
previous mornings at the same time -- issue from the gate of
North Shingles, with his towels under his arm, and make his way
to a boat that was waiting for him on the beach. Swimming was one
among the many personal accomplishments of which the captain was
master. He was rowed out to sea every morning, and took his bath
luxuriously in the deep blue water. Mrs. Lecount had already
computed the time consumed in this recreation by her watch, and
had discovered that a full hour usually elapsed from the moment
when he embarked on the beach to the moment when he returned.

During that period she had never seen any other inhabitant of
North Shingles leave the house. The servant was no doubt at her
work in the kitchen; Mrs. Bygrave was probably still in her bed;
and Miss Bygrave (if she was up at that early hour) had perhaps
received directions not to venture out in her uncle's absence.
The difficulty of meeting the obstacle of Magdalen's presence in
the house had been, for some days past, the one difficulty which
all Mrs. Lecount's ingenuity had thus far proved unable to
overcome.

She sat at the window for a quarter of an hour after the
captain's boat had left the beach with her mind hard at work, and
her eyes fixed mechanically on North Shingles -- she sat
considering what written excuse she could send to her master for
delaying her departure from Aldborough for some days to come --
when the door of the house she was watching suddenly opened, and
Magdalen herself appeared in the garden. There was no mistaking
her figure and her dress. She took a few steps hastily toward the
gate, stopped and pulled down the veil of her garden hat as if
she felt the clear morning light too much for her, then hurried
out on the Parade and walked away northward, in such haste, or in
such pre-occupation of mind, that she went through the garden
gate without closing it after her.

Mrs. Lecount started up from her chair with a moment's doubt of
the evidence of her own eyes. Had the opportunity which she had
been vainly plotting to produce actually offered itself to her of
its own accord? Had the chances declared themselves at last in
her favor, after steadily acting against her for so long? There
was no doubt of it: in the popular phrase, "her luck had turned."
She snatched up her bonnet and mantilla, and made for North
Shingles without an instant's hesitation. Mr. Bygrave out at sea;
Miss Bygrave away for a walk; Mrs. Bygrave and the servant both
at home, and both easily dealt with -- the opportunity was not to
be lost; the risk was well worth running!

This time the house door was easily opened: no one had bolted it
again after Magdalen's departure. Mrs. Lecount closed the door
softly, listened for a moment in the passage, and heard the
servant noisily occupied in the kitchen with her pots and pans.
"If my lucky star leads me straight into Miss Bygrave's room,"
thought the housekeeper, stealing noiselessly up the stairs, "I
may find my way to her wardrobe without disturbing anybody."

She tried the door nearest to the front of the house on the
right-hand side of the landing. Capricious chance had deserted
her already. The lock was turned. She tried the door opposite, on
her left hand. The boots ranged symmetrically in a row, and the
razors on the dressing-table, told her at once that she had not
found the right room yet. She returned to the right-hand side of
the landing, walked down a little passage leading to the back of
the house, and tried a third door. The door opened, and the two
opposite extremes of female humanity, Mrs. Wragge and Mrs.
Lecount, stood face to face in an instant!

"I beg ten thousand pardons!" said Mrs. Lecount, with the most
consummate self-possession.

"Lord bless us and save us!" cried Mrs. Wragge, with the most
helpless amazement.

The two exclamations were uttered in a moment, and in that moment
Mrs. Lecount took the measure of her victim. Nothing of the least
importance escaped her. She noticed the Oriental Cashmere Robe
lying half made, and half unpicked again, on the table; she
noticed the imbecile foot of Mrs. Wragge searching blindly in the
neighborhood of her chair for a lost shoe; she noticed that there
was a second door in the room besides the door by which she had
entered, and a second chair within easy reach, on which she might
do well to seat herself in a friendly and confidential way. "Pray
don't resent my intrusion," pleaded Mrs. Lecount, taking the
chair. "Pray allow me to explain myself!"

Speaking in her softest voice, surveying Mrs. Wragge with a sweet
smile on her insinuating lips, and a melting interest in her
handsome black eyes, the housekeeper told her little introductory
series of falsehoods with an artless truthfulness of manner which
the Father of Lies himself might have envied. She had heard from
Mr. Bygrave that Mrs. Bygrave was a great invalid; she had
constantly reproached herself, in her idle half-hours at Sea View
(where she filled the situation of Mr. Noel Vanstone's
housekeeper), for not having offered her friendly services to
Mrs. Bygrave; she had been directed by her master (doubtless well
known to Mrs. Bygrave, as one of her husband's friends, and,
naturally, one of her charming niece's admirers), to join him
that day at the residence to which he had removed from
Aldborough; she was obliged to leave early, but she could not
reconcile it to her conscience to go without calling to apologize
for her apparent want of neighborly consideration; she had found
nobody in the house; she had not been able to make the servant
hear; she had presumed (not discovering that apartment
downstairs) that Mrs. Bygrave's boudoir might be on the upper
story; she had thoughtlessly committed an intrusion of which she
was sincerely ashamed, and she could now only trust to Mrs.
Bygrave's indulgence to excuse and forgive her.

A less elaborate apology might have served Mrs. Lecount's
purpose. As soon as Mrs. Wragge's struggling perceptions had
grasped the fact that her unexpected visitor was a neighbor well
known to her by repute, her whole being became absorbed in
admiration of Mrs. Lecount's lady-like manners, and Mrs.
Lecount's perfectly-fitting gown! "What a noble way she has of
talking!" thought poor Mrs. Wragge, as the housekeeper reached
her closing sentence. "And, oh my heart alive, how nicely she's
dressed!"

"I see I disturb you," pursued Mrs. Lecount, artfully availing
herself of the Oriental Cashmere Robe as a means ready at hand of
reaching the end she had in view -- "I see I disturb you, ma'am,
over an occupation which, I know by experience, requires the
closest attention. Dear, dear me, you are un picking the dress
again, I see, after it has been made! This is my own experience
again, Mrs. B ygrave. Some dresses are so obstinate! Some dresses
seem to say to one, in so many words, 'No! you may do what you
like with me; I won't fit!'"

Mrs. Wragge was greatly struck by this happy remark. She burst
out laughing, and clapped her great hands in hearty approval.

"That's what this gown has been saying to me ever since I first
put the scissors into it," she exclaimed, cheerfully. "I know
I've got an awful big back, but that's no reason. Why should a
gown be weeks on hand, and then not meet behind you after all? It
hangs over my Boasom like a sack -- it does. Look here, ma'am, at
the skirt. It won't come right. It draggles in front, and cocks
up behind. It shows my heels -- and, Lord knows, I get into
scrapes enough about my heels, without showing them into the
bargain!"

"May I ask a favor?" inquired Mrs. Lecount, confidentially. "May
I try, Mrs. Bygrave, if I can make my experience of any use to
you? I think our bosoms, ma'am, are our great difficulty. Now,
this bosom of yours? -- Shall I say in plain words what I think?
This bosom of yours is an Enormous Mistake!"

"Don't say that!" cried Mrs. Wragge, imploringly. "Don't please,
there's a good soul! It's an awful big one, I know; but it's
modeled, for all that, from one of Magdalen's own."

She was far too deeply interested on the subject of the dress to
notice that she had forgotten herself already, and that she had
referred to Magdalen by her own name. Mrs. Lecount's sharp ears
detected the mistake the instant it was committed. "So! so!" she
thought. "One discovery already. If I had ever doubted my own
suspicions, here is an estimable lady who would now have set me
right. -I beg your pardon," she proceeded, aloud, "did you say
this was modeled from one of your niece's dresses?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Wragge. "It's as like as two peas."

"Then," replied Mrs. Lecount, adroitly, "there must be some
serious mistake in the making of your niece's dress. Can you show
it to me?"

"Bless your heart -- yes!" cried Mrs. Wragge. "Step this way,
ma'am; and bring the gown along with you, please. It keeps
sliding off, out of pure aggravation, if you lay it out on the
table. There's lots of room on the bed in here."

She opened the door of communication and led the way eagerly into
Magdalen's room. As Mrs. Lecount followed, she stole a look at
her watch. Never before had time flown as it flew that morning!
In twenty minutes more Mr. Bygrave would be back from his bath.

"There!" said Mrs. Wragge, throwing open the wardrobe, and taking
a dress down from one of the pegs. "Look there! There's plaits on
her Boasom, and plaits on mine. Six of one and half a dozen of
the other; and mine are the biggest -that's all!"

Mrs. Lecount shook her head gravely, and entered forthwith into
subtleties of disquisition on the art of dressmaking which had
the desired effect of utterly bewildering the proprietor of the
Oriental Cashmere Robe in less than three minutes.

"Don't!" cried Mrs. Wragge, imploringly. "Don't go on like that!
I'm miles behind you; and my head's Buzzing already. Tell us,
like a good soul, what's to be done. You said something about the
pattern just now. Perhaps I'm too big for the pattern? I can't
help it if I am. Many's the good cry I had, when I was a growing
girl, over my own size! There's half too much of me, ma'am --
measure me along or measure me across, I don't deny it -- there's
half too much of me, anyway."

"My dear madam," protested Mrs. Lecount, "you do yourself a
wrong! Permit me to assure you that you possess a commanding
figure -- a figure of Minerva. A majestic simplicity in the form
of a woman imperatively demands a majestic simplicity in the form
of that woman's dress. The laws of costume are classical; the
laws of costume must not be trifled with! Plaits for Venus, puffs
for Juno, folds for Minerva. I venture to suggest a total change
of pattern. Your niece has other dresses in her collection. Why
may we not find a Minerva pattern among them?"

As she said those words, she led the way back to the wardrobe.

Mrs. Wragge followed, and took the dresses out one by one,
shaking her head despondently. Silk dresses appeared, muslin
dresses appeared. The one dress which remained invisible was the
dress of which Mrs. Lecount was in search.

"There's the lot of 'em," said Mrs. Wragge. "They may do for
Venus and the two other Ones (I've seen 'em in picters without a
morsel of decent linen among the three), but they won't do for
Me."

"Surely there is another dress left?" said Mrs. Lecount, pointing
to the wardrobe, but touching nothing in it. "Surely I see
something hanging in the corner behind that dark shawl?"

Mrs. Wragge removed the shawl; Mrs. Lecount opened the door of
the wardrobe a little wider. There -- hitched carelessly on the
innermost peg -- there, with its white spots, and its double
flounce, was the brown Alpaca dress!

The suddenness and completeness of the discovery threw the
housekeeper, practiced dissembler as she was, completely off her
guard. She started at the sight of the dress. The instant
afterward her eyes turned uneasily toward Mrs. Wragge. Had the
start been observed? It had passed entirely unnoticed. Mrs.
Wragge's whole attention was fixed on the Alpaca dress: she was
staring at it incomprehensibly, with an expression of the utmost
dismay.

"You seem alarmed, ma'am," said Mrs. Lecount. "What is there in
the wardrobe to frighten you?"

"I'd have given a crown piece out of my pocket," said Mrs.
Wragge, "not to have set my eyes on that gown. It had gone clean
out of my head, and now it's come back again. Cover it up!" cried
Mrs. Wragge, throwing the shawl over the dress in a sudden fit of
desperation. "If I look at it much longer, I shall think I'm back
again in Vauxhall Walk!"

Vauxhall Walk! Those two words told Mrs. Lecount she was on the
brink of another discovery. She stole a second look at her watch.
There was barely ten minutes to spare before the time when Mr.
Bygrave might return; there was not one of those ten minutes
which might not bring his niece back to the house. Caution
counseled Mrs. Lecount to go, without running any more risks.
Curiosity rooted her to the spot, and gave the courage to stay at
all hazards until the time was up. Her amiable smile began to
harden a little as she probed her way tenderly into Mrs. Wragge's
feeble mind.

"You have some unpleasant remembrances of Vauxhall Walk?" she
said, with the gentlest possible tone of inquiry in her voice.
"Or perhaps I should say, unpleasant remembrances of that dress
belonging to your niece?"

"The last time I saw her with that gown on," said Mrs. Wragge,
dropping into a chair and beginning to tremble, "was the time
when I came back from shopping and saw the Ghost."

"The Ghost?" repeated Mrs. Lecount, clasping her hands in
graceful astonishment. "Dear madam, pardon me! Is there such a
thing in the world? Where did you see it? In Vauxhall Walk? Tell
me -- you are the first lady I ever met with who has seen a ghost
-- pray tell me!"

Flattered by the position of importance which she had suddenly
assumed in the housekeeper's eyes, Mrs. Wragge entered at full
length into the narrative of her supernatural adventure. The
breathless eagerness with which Mrs. Lecount listened to her
description of the specter's costume, the specter's hurry on the
stairs, and the specter's disappearance in the bedroom; the
extraordinary interest which Mrs. Lecount displayed on hearing
that the dress in the wardrobe was the very dress in which
Magdalen happened to be attired at the awful moment when the
ghost vanished, encouraged Mrs. Wragge to wade deeper and deeper
into details, and to involve herself in a confusion of collateral
circumstances out of which there seemed to be no prospect of her
emerging for hours to come. Faster and faster the inexorable
minutes flew by; nearer and nearer came the fatal moment of Mr.
Bygrave's return. Mrs. Lecount looked at her watch for the third
time, without an attempt on this occasion to conceal the action
from her companion's notice. There were literally two minutes
left for her to  get clear of North  Shingles. Two minutes would
be enough, if no accident happened. She had discov ered the
Alpaca dress; she had heard the whole story of the adventure in
Vauxhall Walk; and, more than that, she had even informed herself
of the number of the house -- which Mrs. Wragge happened to
remember, because it answered to the number of years in her own
age. All that was necessary to her master's complete
enlightenment she had now accomplished. Even if there had been
time to stay longer, there was nothing worth staying for. "I'll
strike this worthy idiot dumb with a _coup d'etat_," thought the
housekeeper, "and vanish before she recovers herself."

"Horrible!" cried Mrs. Lecount, interrupting the ghostly
narrative by a shrill little scream and making for the door, to
Mrs. Wragge's unutterable astonishment, without the least
ceremony. "You freeze the very marrow of my bones. Good-morning!"
She coolly tossed the Oriental Cashmere Robe into Mrs. Wragge's
expansive lap and left the room in an instant.

As she swiftly descended the stairs, she heard the door of the
bedroom open.

"Where are your manners?" cried a voice from above, hailing her
feebly over the banisters. "What do you mean by pitching my gown
at me in that way? You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" pursued
Mrs. Wragge, turning from a lamb to a lioness, as she gradually
realized the indignity offered to the Cashmere Robe. "You nasty
foreigner, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!"

Pursued by this valedictory address, Mrs. Lecount reached the
house door, and opened it without interruption. She glided
rapidly along the garden path, passed through the gate, and
finding herself safe on the Parade, stopped, and looked toward
the sea.

The first object which her eyes encountered was the figure of Mr.
Bygrave standing motionless on the beach -- a petrified bather,
with his towels in his hand! One glance at him was enough to show
that he had seen the housekeeper passing out through his garden
gate.

Rightly conjecturing that Mr. Bygrave's first impulse would lead
him to make instant inquiries in his own house, Mrs. Lecount
pursued her way back to Sea View as composedly as if nothing had
happened. When she entered the parlor where her solitary
breakfast was waiting for her, she was surprised to see a letter
lying on the table. She approached to take it up with an
expression of impatience, thinking it might be some tradesman's
bill which she had forgotten.

It was the forged letter from Zurich.

CHAPTER XI.

THE postmark and the handwriting on the address (admirably
imitated from the original) warned Mrs. Lecount of the contents
of the letter before she opened it.

After waiting a moment to compose herself, she read the
announcement of her brother's relapse.

There was nothing in the handwriting, there was no expression in
any part of the letter which could suggest to her mind the
faintest suspicion of foul play. Not the shadow of a doubt
occurred to her that the summons to her brother's bedside was
genuine. The hand that held the letter dropped heavily into her
lap; she became pale, and old, and haggard in a moment. Thoughts,
far removed from her present aims and interests; remembrances
that carried her back to other lands than England, to other times
than the time of her life in service, prolonged their inner
shadows to the surface, and showed the traces of their mysterious
passage darkly on her face. The minutes followed each other, and
still the servant below stairs waited vainly for the parlor bell.
The minutes followed each other, and still she sat, tearless and
quiet, dead to the present and the future, living in the past.

The entrance of the servant, uncalled, roused her. With a heavy
sigh, the cold and secret woman folded the letter up again and
addressed herself to the interests and the duties of the passing
time.

She decided the question of going or not going to Zurich, after a
very brief consideration of it. Before she had drawn her chair to
the breakfast-table she had resolved to go.

Admirably as Captain Wragge's stratagem had worked, it might have
failed -unassisted by the occurrence of the morning -- to achieve
this result. The very accident against which it had been the
captain's chief anxiety to guard -- the accident which had just
taken place in spite of him -- was, of all the events that could
have happened, the one event which falsified every previous
calculation, by directly forwarding the main purpose of the
conspiracy! If Mrs. Lecount had not obtained the information of
which she was in search before the receipt of the letter from
Zurich, the letter might have addressed her in vain. She would
have hesitated before deciding to leave England, and that
hesitation might have proved fatal to the captain's scheme.

As it was, with the plain proofs in her possession, with the gown
discovered in Magdalen's wardrobe, with the piece cut out of it
in her own pocketbook, and with the knowledge, obtained from Mrs.
Wragge, of the very house in which the disguise had been put on,
Mrs. Lecount had now at her command the means of warning Noel
Vanstone as she had never been able to warn him yet, or, in other
words, the means of guarding against any dangerous tendencies
toward reconciliation with the Bygraves which might otherwise
have entered his mind during her absence at Zurich. The only
difficulty which now perplexed her was the difficulty of deciding
whether she should communicate with her master personally or by
writing, before her departure from England.

She looked again at the doctor's letter. The word "instantly," in
the sentence which summoned her to her dying brother, was twice
underlined. Admiral Bartram's house was at some distance from the
railway; the time consumed in driving to St. Crux, and driving
back again, might be time fatally lost on the journey to Zurich.
Although she would infinitely have preferred a personal interview
with Noel Vanstone, there was no choice on a matter of life and
death but to save the precious hours by writing to him.

After sending to secure a place at once in the early coach, she
sat down to write to her master.

Her first thought was to tell him all that had happened at North
Shingles that morning. On reflection, however, she rejected the
idea. Once already (in copying the personal description from Miss
Garth's letter) she had trusted her weapons in her master's
hands, and Mr. Bygrave had contrived to turn them against her.
She resolved this time to keep them strictly in her own
possession. The secret of the missing fragment of the Alpaca
dress was known to no living creature but herself; and, until her
return to England, she determined to keep it to herself. The
necessary impression might be produced on Noel Vanstone's mind
without venturing into details. She knew by experience the form
of letter which might be trusted to produce an effect on him, and
she now wrote it in these words:

"DEAR MR. NOEL -- Sad news has reached me from Switzerland. My
beloved brother is dying and his medical attendant summons me
instantly to Zurich. The serious necessity of availing myself of
the earliest means of conveyance to the Continent leaves me but
one alternative. I must profit by the permission to leave
England, if necessary, which you kindly granted to me at the
beginning of my brother's illness, and I must avoid all delay by
going straight to London, instead of turning aside, as I should
have liked, to see you first at St. Crux.

"Painfully as I am affected by the family calamity which has
fallen on me, I cannot let this opportunity pass without
adverting to another subject which seriously concerns your
welfare, and in which (on that account) your old housekeeper
feels the deepest interest.

"I am going to surprise and shock you, Mr. Noel. Pray don't be
agitated! pray compose yourself!

"The impudent attempt to cheat you, which has happily opened your
eyes to the true character of our neighbors at North Shingles,
was not the only object which Mr. Bygrave had in forcing himself
on your acquaintance. The infamous conspiracy with which you were
threatened in London has been in full progress against you under
Mr. Bygrave's direction, at  Aldborough. Accident -- I will tell
you what accident when we meet -- has put me in possession of i
nformation precious to your future security. I have discovered,
to an absolute certainty, that the person calling herself Miss
Bygrave is no other than the woman who visited us in disguise at
Vauxhall Walk.

"I suspected this from the first, but I had no evidence to
support my suspicions; I had no means of combating the false
impression produced on you. My hands, I thank Heaven, are tied no
longer. I possess absolute proof of the assertion that I have
just made -- proof that your own eyes can see -- proof that would
satisfy you, if you were judge in a Court of Justice.

"Perhaps even yet, Mr. Noel, you will refuse to believe me? Be it
so. Believe me or not, I have one last favor to ask, which your
English sense of fair play will not deny me.

"This melancholy journey of mine will keep me away from England
for a fortnight, or, at most, for three weeks. You will oblige me
-- and you will certainly not sacrifice your own convenience and
pleasure -- by staying through that interval with your friends at
St. Crux. If, before my return, some unexpected circumstance
throws you once more into the company of the Bygraves, and if
your natural kindness of heart inclines you to receive the
excuses which they will, in that case, certainly address to you,
place one trifling restraint on yourself, for your own sake, if
not for mine. Suspend your flirtation with the young lady (I beg
pardon of all other young ladies for calling her so!) until my
return. If, when I come back, I fail to prove to you that Miss
Bygrave is the woman who wore that disguise, and used those
threatening words, in Vauxhall Wall, I will engage to leave your
service at a day's notice; and I will atone for the sin of
bearing false witness against my neighbor by resigning every
claim I have to your grateful remembrance, on your father's
account as well as on your own. I make this engagement without
reserves of any kind; and I promise to abide by it -- if my
proofs fail -- on the faith of a good Catholic, and the word of
an honest woman. Your faithful servant,

"VIRGINIE LECOUNT."

The closing sentences of this letter -- as the housekeeper well
knew when she wrote them -- embodied the one appeal to Noel
Vanstone which could be certainly trusted to produce a deep and
lasting effect. She might have staked her oath, her life, or her
reputation, on proving the assertion which she had made, and have
failed to leave a permanent impression on his mind. But when she
staked not only her position in his service, but her pecuniary
claims on him as well, she at once absorbed the ruling passion of
his life in expectation of the result. There was not a doubt of
it, in the strongest of all his interests -- the interest of
saving his money -- he would wait.

"Checkmate for Mr. Bygrave!" thought Mrs. Lecount, as she sealed
and directed the letter. The battle is over -- the game is played
out."

While Mrs. Lecount was providing for her master's future security
at Sea View, events were in full progress at North Shingles.

As soon as Captain Wragge recovered his astonishment at the
housekeeper's appearance on his own premises, he hurried into the
house, and, guided by his own forebodings of the disaster that
had happened, made straight for his wife's room.

Never, in all her former experience, had poor Mrs. Wragge felt
the full weight of the captain's indignation as she felt it now.
All the little intelligence she naturally possessed vanished at
once in the whirlwind of her husband's rage. The only plain facts
which he could extract from her were two in number. In the first
place, Magdalen's rash desertion of her post proved to have no
better reason to excuse it than Magdalen's incorrigible
impatience: she had passed a sleepless night; she had risen
feverish and wretched; and she had gone out, reckless of all
consequences, to cool her burning head in the fresh air. In the
second place, Mrs. Wragge had, on her own confession, seen Mrs.
Lecount, had talked with Mrs. Lecount, and had ended by telling
Mrs. Lecount the story of the ghost. Having made these
discoveries, Captain Wragge wasted no time in contending with his
wife's terror and confusion. He withdrew at once to a window
which commanded an uninterrupted prospect of Noel Vanstone's
house, and there established himself on the watch for events at
Sea View, precisely as Mrs. Lecount had established herself on
the watch for events at North Shingles.

Not a word of comment on the disaster of the morning escaped him
when Magdalen returned and found him at his post. His flow of
language seemed at last to have run dry. "I told you what Mrs.
Wragge would do," he said, "and Mrs. Wragge has done it." He sat
unflinchingly at the window with a patience which Mrs. Lecount
herself could not have surpassed. The one active proceeding in
which he seemed to think it necessary to engage was performed by
deputy. He sent the servant to the inn to hire a chaise and a
fast horse, and to say that he would call himself before noon
that day and tell the hostler when the vehicle would be wanted.
Not a sign of impatience escaped him until the time drew near for
the departure of the early coach. Then the captain's curly lips
began to twitch with anxiety, and the captain's restless fingers
beat the devil's tattoo unremittingly on the window-pane.

The coach appeared at last, and drew up at Sea View. In a minute
more, Captain Wragge's own observation informed him that one
among the passengers who left Aldborough that morning was -- Mrs.
Lecount.

The main uncertainty disposed of, a serious question -- suggested
by the events of the morning -- still remained to be solved.
Which was the destined end of Mrs. Lecount's journey -- Zurich or
St. Crux? That she would certainly inform her master of Mrs.
Wragge's ghost story, and of every other disclosure in relation
to names and places which might have escaped Mrs. Wragge's lips,
was beyond all doubt. But of the two ways at her disposal of
doing the mischief -either personally or by letter -- it was
vitally important to the captain to know which she had chosen. If
she had gone to the admiral's, no choice would be left him but to
follow the coach, to catch the train by which she traveled, and
to outstrip her afterward on the drive from the station in Essex
to St. Crux. If, on the contrary, she had been contented with
writing to her master, it would only be necessary to devise
measures for intercepting the letter. The captain decided on
going to the post-office, in the first place. Assuming that the
housekeeper had written, she would not have left the letter at
the mercy of the servant -- she would have seen it safely in the
letter-box before leaving Aldborough.

"Good-morning," said the captain, cheerfully addressing the
postmaster. "I am Mr. Bygrave of North Shingles. I think you have
a letter in the box, addressed to Mr. -- ?"

The postmaster was a short man, and consequently a man with a
proper idea of his own importance. He solemnly checked Captain
Wragge in full career.

"When a letter is once posted, sir," he said, "nobody out of the
office has any business with it until it reaches its address."

The captain was not a man to be daunted, even by a postmaster. A
bright idea struck him. He took out his pocketbook, in which
Admiral Bartram's address was written, and returned to the
charge.

"Suppose a letter has been wrongly directed by mistake?" he
began. "And suppose the writer wants to correct the error after
the letter is put into the box?"

"When a letter is once posted, sir," reiterated the impenetrable
local authority, "nobody out of the office touches it on any
pretense whatever."

"Granted, with all my heart," persisted the captain. "I don't
want to touch it -- I only want to explain myself. A lady has
posted a letter here, addressed to 'Noel Vanstone, Esq., Admiral
Bartram's, St. Crux-in-the-Marsh, Essex.' She wrote in a great
hurry, and she is not quite certain whether she added the name of
the post-town, 'Ossory.' It is of the last importance that the
delivery of the letter should not be delayed. What is to hinder
your facili tating the post-office work, and obliging a lady, by
adding the name of the post-town (if it happens
to be left out), with your own hand? I put it to you as a
zealous officer, what possible objection can there be to granting
my request?"

The postmaster was compelled to acknowledge that there could be
no objection, provided nothing but a necessary line was added to
the address, provided nobody touched the letter but himself, and
provided the precious time of the post-office was not suffered to
run to waste. As there happened to be nothing particular to do at
that moment, he would readily oblige the lady at Mr. Bygrave's
request.

Captain Wragge watched the postmaster's hands, as they sorted the
letters in the box, with breathless eagerness. Was the letter
there? Would the hands of the zealous public servant suddenly
stop? Yes! They stopped, and picked out a letter from the rest.

"'Noel Vanstone, Esquire,' did you say?" asked the postmaster,
keeping the letter in his own hand.

"'Noel Vanstone, Esquire,'" replied the captain, "'Admiral
Bartram's, St. Crux-in-the-Marsh.'"

"Ossory, Essex," chimed in the postmaster, throwing the letter
back into the box. "The lady has made no mistake, sir. The
address is quite right."

Nothing but a timely consideration of the heavy debt he owed to
appearances prevented Captain Wragge from throwing his tall white
hat up in the air as soon as he found the street once more. All
further doubt was now at an end. Mrs. Lecount had written to her
master -- therefore Mrs. Lecount was on her way to Zurich!

With his head higher than ever, with the tails of his respectable
frock-coat floating behind him in the breeze, with his bosom's
native impudence sitting lightly on its throne, the captain
strutted to the inn and called for the railway time-table. After
making certain calculations (in black and white, as a matter of
course), he ordered his chaise to be ready in an hour -- so as to
reach the railway in time for the second train running to London
-- with which there happened to be no communication from
Aldborough by coach.

His next proceeding was of a far more serious kind; his next
proceeding implied a terrible certainty of success. The day of
the week was Thursday. From the inn he went to the church, saw
the clerk, and gave the necessary notice for a marriage by
license on the following Monday.

Bold as he was, his nerves were a little shaken by this last
achievement; his hand trembled as it lifted the latch of the
garden gate. He doctored his nerves with brandy and water before
he sent for Magdalen to inform her of the proceedings of the
morning. Another outbreak might reasonably be expected when she
heard that the last irrevocable step had been taken, and that
notice had been given of the wedding-day.

The captain's watch warned him to lose no time in emptying his
glass. In a few minutes he sent the necessary message upstairs.
While waiting for Magdalen's appearance, he provided himself with
certain materials which were now necessary to carry the
enterprise to its crowning point. In the first place, he wrote
his assumed name (by no means in so fine a hand as usual) on a
blank visiting-card, and added underneath these words: "Not a
moment is to be lost. I am waiting for you at the door -- come
down to me directly." His next proceeding was to take some
half-dozen envelopes out of the case, and to direct them all
alike to the following address: "Thomas Bygrave, Esq., Mussared's
Hotel, Salisbury Street, Strand, London." After carefully placing
the envelopes and the card in his breast-pocket, he shut up the
desk. As he rose from the writing-table, Magdalen came into the
room.

The captain took a moment to decide on the best method of opening
the interview, and determined, in his own phrase, to dash at it.
In two words he told Magdalen what had happened, and informed her
that Monday was to be her wedding-day.

He was prepared to quiet her, if she burst into a frenzy of
passion; to reason with her, if she begged for time; to
sympathize with her, if she melted into tears. To his
inexpressible surprise, results falsified all his calculations.
She heard him without uttering a word, without shedding a tear.
When he had done, she dropped into a chair. Her large gray eyes
stared at him vacantly. In one mysterious instant all her beauty
left her; her face stiffened awfully, like the face of a corpse.
For the first time in the captain's experience of her, fear --
all-mastering fear -- had taken possession of her, body and soul.

"You are not flinching," he said, trying to rouse her. "Surely
you are not flinching at the last moment?"

No light of intelligence came into her eyes, no change passed
over her face. But she heard him -- for she moved a little in the
chair, and slowly shook her head.

"You planned this marriage of your own freewill," pursued the
captain, with the furtive look and the faltering voice of a man
ill at ease. "It was your own idea -- not mine. I won't have the
responsibility laid on my shoulders -- no! not for twice two
hundred pounds. If your resolution fails you; if you think better
of it -- ?"

He stopped. Her face was changing; her lips were moving at last.
She slowly raised her left hand, with the fingers outspread; she
looked at it as if it was a hand that was strange to her; she
counted the days on it, the days before the marriage.

"Friday, one," she whispered to herself; "Saturday, two; Sunday,
three; Monday -- " Her hands dropped into her lap, her face
stiffened again; the deadly fear fastened its paralyzing hold on
her once more, and the next words died away on her lips.

Captain Wragge took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead.

"Damn the two hundred pounds!" he said. "Two thousand wouldn't
pay me for this!"

He put the handkerchief back, took the envelopes which he had
addressed to himself out of his pocket, and, approaching her
closely for the first time, laid his hand on her arm.

"Rouse yourself, "he said, "I have a last word to say to you. Can
you listen?"

She struggled, and roused herself -- a faint tinge of color stole
over her white cheeks -- she bowed her head.

"Look at these," pursued Captain Wragge, holding up the
envelopes. "If I turn these to the use for which they have been
written, Mrs. Lecount's master will never receive Mrs. Lecount's
letter. If I tear them up, he will know by to-morrow's post that
you are the woman who visited him in Vauxhall Walk. Say the word!
Shall I tear the envelopes up, or shall I put them back in my
pocket?"

There was a pause of dead silence. The murmur of the summer waves
on the shingle of the beach and the voices of the summer idlers
on the Parade floated through the open window, and filled the
empty stillness of the room.

She raised her head; she lifted her hand and pointed steadily to
the envelopes.

"Put them back," she said.

"Do you mean it?" he asked.

"I mean it."

As she gave that answer, there was a sound of wheels on the road
outside.

"You hear those wheels?" said Captain Wragge.

"I hear them."

"You see the chaise?" said the captain, pointing through the
window as the chaise which had been ordered from the inn made its
appearance at the garden gate.

"I see it."

"And, of your own free-will, you tell me to go?"

"Yes. Go!"

Without another word he left her. The servant was waiting at the
door with his traveling bag. "Miss Bygrave is not well," he said.
"Tell your mistress to go to her in the parlor."

He stepped into the chaise, and started on the first stage of the
journey to St. Crux.

CHAPTER XII.

TOWARD three o'clock in the afternoon Captain Wragge stopped at
the nearest station to Ossory which the railway passed in its
course through Essex. Inquiries made on the spot informed him
that he might drive to St. Crux, remain there for a quarter of an
hour, and return to the station in time for an evening train to
London. In ten minutes more the captain was on the road again,
driving rapidly in the direction of the coast.

After proceeding some miles on the highway, the carriage turned
off, and the coachman involved himself in an intricate network of
cross-roads.

"Are we far from St. Crux?" asked the captain, growing impat
ient, after mile on mile had been passed without a sign of
reaching the journey's end.

"You'll see
the house, sir, at the next turn in the road," said the man.

The next turn in the road brought them within view of the open
country again. Ahead of the carriage, Captain Wragge saw a long
dark line against the sky -the line of the sea-wall which
protects the low coast of Essex from inundation. The flat
intermediate country was intersected by a labyrinth of tidal
streams, winding up from the invisible sea in strange fantastic
curves -- rivers at high water, and channels of mud at low. On
his right hand was a quaint little village, mostly composed of
wooden houses, straggling down to the brink of one of the tidal
streams. On his left hand, further away, rose the gloomy ruins of
an abbey, with a desolate pile of buildings, which covered two
sides of a square attached to it. One of the streams from the sea
(called, in Essex, "backwaters") curled almost entirely round the
house. Another, from an opposite quarter, appeared to run
straight through the grounds, and to separate one side of the
shapeless mass of buildings, which was in moderate repair, from
another, which was little better than a ruin. Bridges of wood and
bridges of brick crossed the stream, and gave access to the house
from all points of the compass. No human creature appeared in the
neighborhood, and no sound was heard but the hoarse barking of a
house-dog from an invisible courtyard.

"Which door shall I drive to, sir?" asked the coachman. "The
front or the back?"

"The back," said Captain Wragge, feeling that the less notice he
attracted in his present position, the safer that position might
be.

The carriage twice crossed the stream before the coachman made
his way through the grounds into a dreary inclosure of stone. At
an open door on the inhabited side of the place sat a
weather-beaten old man, busily at work on a half-finished model
of a ship. He rose and came to the carriage door, lifting up his
spectacles on his forehead, and looking disconcerted at the
appearance of a stranger.

"Is Mr. Noel Vanstone staying here?" asked Captain Wragge.

"Yes, sir," replied the old man. "Mr. Noel came yesterday."

"Take that card to Mr. Vanstone, if you please," said the
captain, "and say I am waiting here to see him."

In a few minutes Noel Vanstone made his appearance, breathless
and eager -absorbed in anxiety for news from Aldborough. Captain
Wragge opened the carriage door, seized his outstretched hand,
and pulled him in without ceremony.

"Your housekeeper has gone," whispered the captain, "and you are
to be married on Monday. Don't agitate yourself, and don't
express your feelings -- there isn't time for it. Get the first
active servant you can find in the house to pack your bag in ten
minutes, take leave of the admiral, and come back at once with me
to the London train."

Noel Vanstone faintly attempted to ask a question. The captain
declined to hear it.

"As much talk as you like on the road," he said. "Time is too
precious for talking here. How do we know Lecount may not think
better of it? How do we know she may not turn back before she
gets to Zurich?"

That startling consideration terrified Noel Vanstone into instant
submission.

"What shall I say to the admiral?" he asked, helplessly.

"Tell him you are going to be married, to be sure! What does it
matter, now Lecount's back is turned? If he wonders you didn't
tell him before, say it's a runaway match, and the bride is
waiting for you. Stop! Any letters addressed to you in your
absence will be sent to this place, of course? Give the admiral
these envelopes, and tell him to forward your letters under cover
to me. I am an old customer at the hotel we are going to; and if
we find the place full, the landlord may be depended on to take
care of any letters with my name on them. A safe address in
London for your correspondence may be of the greatest importance.
How do we know Lecount may not write to you on her way to
Zurich?"

"What a head you have got!" cried Noel Vanstone, eagerly taking
the envelopes. "You think of everything."

He left the carriage in high excitement, and ran back into the
house. In ten minutes more Captain Wragge had him in safe
custody, and the horses started on their return journey.

The travelers reached London in good time that evening, and found
accommodation at the hotel.

Knowing the restless, inquisitive nature of the man he had to
deal with, Captain Wragge had anticipated some little difficulty
and embarrassment in meeting the questions which Noel Vanstone
might put to him on the way to London. To his great relief, a
startling domestic discovery absorbed his traveling companion's
whole attention at the outset of the journey. By some
extraordinary oversight, Miss Bygrave had been left, on the eve
of her marriage, unprovided with a maid. Noel Vanstone declared
that he would take the whole responsibility of correcting this
deficiency in the arrangements, on his own shoulders; he would
not trouble Mr. Bygrave to give him any assistance; he would
confer, when they got to their journey's end, with the landlady
of the hotel, and would examine the candidates for the vacant
office himself. All the way to London, he returned again and
again to the same subject; all the evening, at the hotel, he was
in and out of the landlady's sitting-room, until he fairly
obliged her to lock the door. In every other proceeding which
related to his marriage, he had been kept in the background; he
had been compelled to follow in the footsteps of his ingenious
friend. In the matter of the lady's maid he claimed his fitting
position at last -- he followed nobody; he took the lead!

The forenoon of the next day was devoted to obtaining the license
-- the personal distinction of making the declaration on oath
being eagerly accepted by Noel Vanstone, who swore, in perfect
good faith (on information previously obtained from the captain)
that the lady was of age. The document procured, the bridegroom
returned to examine the characters and qualifications of the
women-servants out of the place whom the landlady had engaged to
summon to the hotel, while Captain Wragge turned his steps, "on
business personal to himself," toward the residence of a friend
in a distant quarter of London.

The captain's friend was connected with the law, and the
captain's business was of a twofold nature. His first object was
to inform himself of the legal bearings of the approaching
marriage on the future of the husband and the wife. His second
object was to provide beforehand for destroying all traces of the
destination to which he might betake himself when he left
Aldborough on the wedding-day. Having reached his end
successfully in both these cases, he returned to the hotel, and
found Noel Vanstone nursing his offended dignity in the
landlady's sitting-room. Three ladies' maids had appeared to pass
their examination, and had all, on coming to the question of
wages, impudently declined accepting the place. A fourth
candidate was expected to present herself on the next day; and,
until she made her appearance, Noel Vanstone positively declined
removing from the metropolis. Captain Wragge showed his annoyance
openly at the unnecessary delay thus occasioned in the return to
Aldborough, but without producing any effect. Noel Vanstone shook
his obstinate little head, and solemnly refused to trifle with
his responsibilities.

The first event which occurred on Saturday morning was the
arrival of Mrs. Lecount's letter to her master, inclosed in one
of the envelopes which the captain had addressed to himself. He
received it (by previous arrangement with the waiter) in his
bedroom -- read it with the closest attention -- and put it away
carefully in his pocketbook. The letter was ominous of serious
events to come when the housekeeper returned to England; and it
was due to Magdalen -- who was the person threatened -- to place
the warning of danger in her own possession.

Later in the day the fourth candidate appeared for the maid's
situation -- a young woman of small expectations and subdued
manners, who looked (as the landlady remarked) like a person
overtaken  by misfortune. She passed the ordeal of examination
successfully, and accepted the wages offered with out a murmur.
The engagement having been ratified on both sides, fresh delays
ensued, of which Noel Vanstone was once more the cause. He had
not yet made up his mind whether he would, or would not, give
more than a guinea for the wedding-ring; and he wasted the rest
of the day to such disastrous purpose in one jeweler's shop after
another, that he and the captain, and the new lady's maid (who
traveled with them), were barely in time to catch the last train
from London that evening. It was late at night when they left the
railway at the nearest station to Aldborough. Captain Wragge had
been strangely silent all through the journey. His mind was ill
at ease. He had left Magdalen, under very critical circumstances,
with no fit person to control her, and he was wholly ignorant of
the progress of events in his absence at North Shingles.

CHAPTER XIII.

WHAT had happened at Aldborough in Captain Wragge's absence?
Events had occurred which the captain's utmost dexterity might
have found it hard to remedy.

As soon as the chaise had left North Shingles, Mrs. Wragge
received the message which her husband had charged the servant to
deliver. She hastened into the parlor, bewildered by her stormy
interview with the captain, and penitently conscious that she had
done wrong, without knowing what the wrong was. If Magdalen's
mind had been unoccupied by the one idea of the marriage which
now filled it -- if she had possessed composure enough to listen
to Mrs. Wragge's rambling narrative of what had happened during
her interview with the housekeeper -- Mrs. Lecount's visit to the
wardrobe must, sooner or later, have formed part of the
disclosure; and Magdalen, although she might never have guessed
the truth, must at least have been warned that there was some
element of danger lurking treacherously in the Alpaca dress. As
it was, no such consequence as this followed Mrs. Wragge's
appearance in the parlor; for no such consequence was now
possible.

Events which had happened earlier in the morning, events which
had happened for days and weeks past, had vanished as completely
from Magdalen's mind as if they had never taken place. The horror
of the coming Monday -- the merciless certainty implied in the
appointment of the day and hour -- petrified all feeling in her,
and annihilated all thought. Mrs. Wragge made three separate
attempts to enter on the subject of the housekeeper's visit. The
first time she might as well have addressed herself to the wind,
or to the sea. The second attempt seemed likely to be more
successful. Magdalen sighed, listened for a moment indifferently,
and then dismissed the subject. "It doesn't matter," she said.
"The end has come all the same. I'm not angry with you. Say no
more." Later in the day, from not knowing what else to talk
about, Mrs. Wragge tried again. This time Magdalen turned on her
impatiently. "For God's sake, don't worry me about trifles! I
can't bear it." Mrs. Wragge closed her lips on the spot, and
returned to the subject no more. Magdalen, who had been kind to
her at all other times, had angrily forbidden it. The captain --
utterly ignorant of Mrs. Lecount's interest in the secrets of the
wardrobe -- had never so much as approached it. All the
information that he had extracted from his wife's mental
confusion, he had extracted by putting direct questions, derived
purely from the resources of his own knowledge. He had insisted
on plain answers, without excuses of any kind; he had carried his
point as usual; and his departure the same morning had left him
no chance of re-opening the question, even if his irritation
against his wife had permitted him to do so. There the Alpaca
dress hung, neglected in the dark -- the unnoticed, unsuspected
center of dangers that were still to come.

Toward the afternoon Mrs. Wragge took courage to start a
suggestion of her own -- she pleaded for a little turn in the
fresh air.

Magdalen passively put on her hat; passively accompanied her
companion along the public walk, until they reached its northward
extremity. Here the beach was left solitary, and here they sat
down, side by side, on the shingle. It was a bright, exhilarating
day; pleasure-boats were sailing on the calm blue water;
Aldborough was idling happily afloat and ashore. Mrs. Wragge
recovered her spirits in the gayety of the prospect -- she amused
herself like a child, by tossing pebbles into the sea. From time
to time she stole a questioning glance at Magdalen, and saw no
encouragement in her manner, no change to cordiality in her face.
She sat silent on the slope of the shingle, with her elbow on her
knee, and her head resting on her hand, looking out over the sea
-- looking with rapt attention, and yet with eyes that seemed to
notice nothing. Mrs. Wragge wearied of the pebbles, and lost her
interest in looking at the pleasure-boats. Her great head began
to nod heavily, and she dozed in the warm, drowsy air. When she
woke, the pleasure-boats were far off; their sails were white
specks in the distance. The idlers on the beach were thinned in
number; the sun was low in the heaven; the blue sea was darker,
and rippled by a breeze. Changes on sky and earth and ocean told
of the waning day; change was everywhere -- except close at her
side. There Magdalen sat, in the same position, with weary eyes
that still looked over the sea, and still saw nothing.

"Oh, do speak to me!" said Mrs. Wragge.

Magdalen started, and looked about her vacantly.

"It's late," she said, shivering under the first sensation that
reached her of the rising breeze. "Come home; you want your tea."
They walked home in silence.

"Don't be angry with me for asking," said Mrs. Wragge, as they
sat together at the tea-table. "Are you troubled, my dear, in
your mind?"

"Yes," replied Magdalen. "Don't notice me. My trouble will soon
be over."

She waited patiently until Mrs. Wragge had made an end of the
meal, and then went upstairs to her own room.

"Monday!" she said, as she sat down at her toilet-table.
"Something may happen before Monday comes!"

Her fingers wandered mechanically among the brushes and combs,
the tiny bottles and cases placed on the table. She set them in
order, now in one way, and now in another -- then on a sudden
pushed them away from her in a heap. For a minute or two her
hands remained idle. That interval passed, they grew restless
again, and pulled the two little drawers backward and forward in
their grooves. Among the objects laid in one of them was a
Prayer-book which had belonged to her at Combe-Raven, and which
she had saved with her other relics of the past, when she and her
sister had taken their farewell of home. She opened the
Prayer-book, after a long hesitation, at the Marriage Service,
shut it again before she had read a line, and put it back
hurriedly in one of the drawers. After turning the key in the
locks, she rose and walked to the window. "The horrible sea!" she
said, turning from it with a shudder of disgust -- "the lonely,
dreary, horrible sea!"

She went back to the drawer, and took the Prayer-book out for the
second time, half opened it again at the Marriage Service, and
impatiently threw it back into the drawer. This time, after
turning the lock, she took the key away, walked with it in her
hand to the open window, and threw it violently from her into the
garden. It fell on a bed thickly planted with flowers. It was
invisible; it was lost. The sense of its loss seemed to relieve
her.

"Something may happen on Friday; something may happen on
Saturday; something may happen on Sunday. Three days still!"

She closed the green shutters outside the window and drew the
curtains to darken the room still more. Her head felt heavy; her
eyes were burning hot. She threw herself on her bed, with a
sullen impulse to sleep away the time. The quiet of the house
helped her; the darkness of the room helped her; the stupor of
mind into which she had fallen had its effect on her senses; she
dropped into a broken sleep. Her restless hands moved
incessantly, her head tossed from side to side of the pillow, but
still she slept. Ere long words fell by ones and twos from her
lips; words whispered in her sleep, growing more and more co
ntinuous, more and more articulate, the longer the sleep lasted
-- words which seemed to calm her restlessness and to hush her
into deeper repose. She smiled; she was in the happy land of
dreams; Frank's name escaped her. "Do you love me, Frank?" she
whispered. "Oh, my darling, say it again! say it again!"

The time passed, the room grew darker; and still she slumbered
and dreamed. Toward sunset -- without any noise inside the house
or out to account for it -she started up on the bed, awake again
in an instant. The drowsy obscurity of the room struck her with
terror. She ran to the window, pushed open the shutters, and
leaned far out into the evening air and the evening light. Her
eyes devoured the trivial sights on the beach; her ears drank in
the welcome murmur of the sea. Anything to deliver her from the
waking impression which her dreams had left! No more darkness, no
more repose. Sleep that came mercifully to others came
treacherously to her. Sleep had only closed her eyes on the
future, to open them on the past.

She went down again into the parlor, eager to talk -- no matter
how idly, no matter on what trifles. The room was empty. Perhaps
Mrs. Wragge had gone to her work -- perhaps she was too tired to
talk. Magdalen took her hat from the table and went out. The sea
that she had shrunk from, a few hours since, looked friendly now.
How lovely it was in its cool evening blue! What a god-like joy
in the happy multitude of waves leaping up to the light of
heaven!

She stayed out until the night fell and the stars appeared. The
night steadied her.

By slow degrees her mind recovered its balance and she looked her
position unflinchingly in the face. The vain hope that accident
might defeat the very end for which, of her own free-will, she
had ceaselessly plotted and toiled, vanished and left her;
self-dissipated in its own weakness. She knew the true
alternative, and faced it. On one side was the revolting ordeal
of the marriage; on the other, the abandonment of her purpose.
Was it too late to choose between the sacrifice of the purpose
and the sacrifice of herself? Yes! too late. The backward path
had closed behind her. Time that no wish could change, Time that
no prayers could recall, had made her purpose a part of herself:
once she had governed it; now it governed her. The more she
shrank, the harder she struggled, the more mercilessly it drove
her on. No other feeling in her was strong enough to master it --
not even the horror that was maddening her -- the horror of her
marriage.

Toward nine o'clock she went back to the house.

"Walking again!" said Mrs. Wragge, meeting her at the door. "Come
in and sit down, my dear. How tired you must be!"

Magdalen smiled, and patted Mrs. Wragge kindly on the shoulder.

"You forget how strong I am," she said. "Nothing hurts me."

She lit her candle and went upstairs again into her room. As she
returned to the old place by her toilet-table, the vain hope in
the three days of delay, the vain hope of deliverance by
accident, came back to her -- this time in a form more tangible
than the form which it had hitherto worn.

"Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Something may happen to him; something
may happen to me. Something serious; something fatal. One of us
may die."

A sudden change came over her face. She shivered, though there
was no cold in the air. She started, though there was no noise to
alarm her.

"One of us may die. I may be the one."

She fell into deep thought, roused herself after a while, and,
opening the door, called to Mrs. Wragge to come and speak to her.

"You were right in thinking I should fatigue myself," she said.
"My walk has been a little too much for me. I feel tired, and I
am going to bed. Good-night." She kissed Mrs. Wragge and softly
closed the door again.

After a few turns backward and forward in the room, she abruptly
opened her writing-case and began a letter to her sister. The
letter grew and grew under her hands; she filled sheet after
sheet of note-paper. Her heart was full of her subject: it was
her own story addressed to Norah. She shed no tears; she was
composed to a quiet sadness. Her pen ran smoothly on. After
writing for more than two hours, she left off while the letter
was still unfinished. There was no signature attached to it --
there was a blank space reserved, to be filled up at some other
time. After putting away the case, with the sheets of writing
secured inside it, she walked to the window for air, and stood
there looking out.

The moon was waning over the sea. The breeze of the earlier hours
had died out. On earth and ocean, the spirit of the Night brooded
in a deep and awful calm.

Her head drooped low on her bosom, and all the view waned before
her eyes with the waning moon. She saw no sea, no sky. Death, the
Tempter, was busy at her heart. Death, the Tempter, pointed
homeward, to the grave of her dead parents in Combe-Raven
churchyard.

"Nineteen last birthday," she thought. "Only nineteen!" She moved
away from the window, hesitated, and then looked out again at the
view. "The beautiful night!" she said, gratefully. "Oh, the
beautiful night!"

She left the window and lay down on her bed. Sleep, that had come
treacherously before, came mercifully now; came deep and
dreamless, the image of her last waking thought -- the image of
Death.

Early the next morning Mrs. Wragge went into Magdalen's room, and
found that she had risen betimes. She was sitting before the
glass, drawing the comb slowly through and through her hair --
thoughtful and quiet.

"How do you feel this morning, my dear?" asked Mrs. Wragge.
"Quite well again?"

"Yes."

After replying in the affirmative, she stopped, considered for a
moment, and suddenly contradicted herself.

"No," she said, "not quite well. I am suffering a little from
toothache."

As she altered her first answer in those words she gave a twist
to her hair with the comb, so that it fell forward and hid her
face.

At breakfast she was very silent, and she took nothing but a cup
of tea.

"Let me go to the chemist's and get something," said Mrs. Wragge.

"No, thank you."

"Do let me!"

"No!"

She refused for the second time, sharply and angrily. As usual,
Mrs. Wragge submitted, and let her have her own way. When
breakfast was over, she rose, without a word of explanation, and
went out. Mrs. Wragge watched her from the window and saw that
she took the direction of the chemist's shop.

On reaching the chemist's door she stopped -- paused before
entering the shop, and looked in at the window -- hesitated, and
walked away a little -- hesitated again, and took the first
turning which led back to the beach.

Without looking about her, without caring what place she chose,
she seated herself on the shingle. The only persons who were near
to her, in the position she now occupied, were a nursemaid and
two little boys. The youngest of the two had a tiny toy-ship in
his hand. After looking at Magdalen for a little while with the
quaintest gravity and attention, the boy suddenly approached her,
and opened the way to an acquaintance by putting his toy
composedly on her lap.

"Look at my ship," said the child, crossing his hands on
Magdalen's knee.

She was not usually patient with children. In happier days she
would not have met the boy's advance toward her as she met it
now. The hard despair in her eyes left them suddenly; her
fast-closed lips parted and trembled. She put the ship back into
the child's hands and lifted him on her lap.

"Will you give me a kiss?" she said, faintly. The boy looked at
his ship as if he would rather have kissed the ship.

She repeated the question -- repeated it almost humbly. The child
put his hand up to her neck and kissed her.

"If I was your sister, would you love me?" All the misery of her
friendless position, all the wasted tenderness of her heart,
poured from her in those words.

"Would you love me?" she repeated, hiding her face on the bosom
of the child's frock.

"Yes," said the boy. "Look at my ship."

She looked at the  ship through her gathering tears.

"What do you call it?" she asked, trying ha rd to find her way
even to the interest of a child.

"I call it Uncle Kirke's ship," said the boy. "Un cle Kirke has
gone away."

The name recalled nothing to her memory. No remembrances but old
remembrances lived in her now. "Gone?" she repeated absently,
thinking what she should say to her little friend next.

"Yes," said the boy. "Gone to China."

Even from the lips of a child that word struck her to the heart.
She put Kirke's little nephew off her lap, and instantly left the
beach.

As she turned back to the house, the struggle of the past night
renewed itself in her mind. But the sense of relief which the
child had brought to her, the reviving tenderness which she had
felt while he sat on her knee, influenced her still. She was
conscious of a dawning hope, opening freshly on her thoughts, as
the boy's innocent eyes had opened on her face when he came to
her on the beach. Was it too late to turn back? Once more she
asked herself that question, and now, for the first time, she
asked it in doubt.

She ran up to her own room with a lurking distrust in her changed
self which warned her to act, and not to think. Without waiting
to remove her shawl or to take off her hat, she opened her
writing-case and addressed these lines to Captain Wragge as fast
as her pen could trace them:

"You will find the money I promised you inclosed in this. My
resolution has failed me. The horror of marrying him is more than
I can face. I have left Aldborough. Pity my weakness, and forget
me. Let us never meet again."

With throbbing heart, with eager, trembling fingers, she drew her
little white silk bag from her bosom and took out the banknotes
to inclose them in the letter. Her hand searched impetuously; her
hand had lost its discrimination of touch. She grasped the whole
contents of the bag in one handful of papers, and drew them out
violently, tearing some and disarranging the folds of others. As
she threw them down before her on the table, the first object
that met her eye was her own handwriting, faded already with
time. She looked closer, and saw the words she had copied from
her dead father's letter -- saw the lawyer's brief and terrible
commentary on them confronting her at the bottom of the page:

_Mr. Vanstone's daughters are Nobody's Children, and the law
leaves them helpless at their uncle's mercy._

Her throbbing heart stopped; her trembling hands grew icily
quiet. All the Past rose before her in mute, overwhelming
reproach. She took up the lines which her own hand had written
hardly a minute since, and looked at the ink, still wet on the
letters, with a vacant incredulity.

The color that had risen on her cheeks faded from them once more.
The hard despair looked out again, cold and glittering, in her
tearless eyes. She folded the banknotes carefully, and put them
back in her bag. She pressed the copy of her father's letter to
her lips, and returned it to its place with the banknotes. When
the bag was in her bosom again, she waited a little, with her
face hidden in her hands, then deliberately tore up the lines
addressed to Captain Wragge. Before the ink was dry, the letter
lay in fragments on the floor.

"No!" she said, as the last morsel of the torn paper dropped from
her hand. "On the way I go there is no turning back."

She rose composedly and left the room. While descending the
stairs, she met Mrs. Wragge coming up. "Going out again, my
dear?" asked Mrs. Wragge. "May I go with you?"

Magdalen's attention wandered. Instead of answering the question,
she absently answered her own thoughts.

"Thousands of women marry for money," she said. "Why shouldn't
I?"

The helpless perplexity of Mrs. Wragge's face as she spoke those
words roused her to a sense of present things. "My poor dear!"
she said; "I puzzle you, don't I? Never mind what I say -- all
girls talk nonsense, and I'm no better than the rest of them.
Come! I'll give you a treat. You shall enjoy yourself while the
captain is away. We will have a long drive by ourselves. Put on
your smart bonnet, and come with me to the hotel. I'll tell the
landlady to put a nice cold dinner into a basket. You shall have
all the things you like, and I'll wait on you. When you are an
old, old woman, you will remember me kindly, won't you? You will
say: 'She wasn't a bad girl; hundreds worse than she was live and
prosper, and nobody blames them.' There! there! go and put your
bonnet on. Oh, my God, what is my heart made of! How it lives and
lives, when other girls' hearts would have died in them long
ago!"

In half an hour more she and Mrs. Wragge were seated together in
the carriage. One of the horses was restive at starting. "Flog
him," she cried angrily to the driver. "What are you frightened
about? Flog him! Suppose the carriage was upset," she said,
turning suddenly to her companion; "and suppose I was thrown out
and killed on the spot? Nonsense! don't look at me in that way.
I'm like your husband; I have a dash of humor, and I'm only
joking."

They were out the whole day. When they reached home again, it was
after dark. The long succession of hours passed in the fresh air
left them both with the same sense of fatigue. Again that night
Magdalen slept the deep dreamless sleep of the night before. And
so the Friday closed.

Her last thought at night had been the thought which had
sustained her throughout the day. She had laid her head on the
pillow with the same reckless resolution to submit to the coming
trial which had already expressed itself in words when she and
Mrs. Wragge met by accident on the stairs. When she woke on the
morning of Saturday, the resolution was gone. The Friday's
thoughts -- the Friday's events even -- were blotted out of her
mind. Once again, creeping chill through the flow of her young
blood, she felt the slow and deadly prompting of despair which
had come to her in the waning moonlight, which had whispered to
her in the awful calm.

"I saw the end as the end must be," she said to herself, "on
Thursday night. I have been wrong ever since."

When she and her companion met that morning, she reiterated her
complaint of suffering from the toothache; she repeated her
refusal to allow Mrs. Wragge to procure a remedy; she left the
house after breakfast, in the direction of the chemist's shop,
exactly as she had left it on the morning before.

This time she entered the shop without an instant's hesitation.

"I have got an attack of toothache," she said, abruptly, to an
elderly man who stood behind the counter.

"May I look at the tooth, miss?"

"There is no necessity to look. It is a hollow tooth. I think I
have caught cold in it."

The chemist recommended various remedies which were in vogue
fifteen years since. She declined purchasing any of them.

"I have always found Laudanum relieve the pain better than
anything else," she said, trifling with the bottles on the
counter, and looking at them while she spoke, instead of looking
at the chemist. "Let me have some Laudanum."

"Certainly, miss. Excuse my asking the question -- it is only a
matter of form. You are staying at Aldborough, I think?"

"Yes. I am Miss Bygrave, of North Shingles."

The chemist bowed; and, turning to his shelves, filled an
ordinary half-ounce bottle with laudanum immediately. In
ascertaining his customer's name and address beforehand, the
owner of the shop had taken a precaution which was natural to a
careful man, but which was by no means universal, under similar
circumstances, in the state of the law at that time.

"Shall I put you up a little cotton wool with the laudanum?" he
asked, after he had placed a label on the bottle, and had written
a word on it in large letters.

"If you please. What have you just written on the bottle?" She
put the question sharply, with something of distrust as well as
curiosity in her manner.

The chemist answered the question by turning the label toward
her. She saw written on it, in large letters -- POISON.

"I like to be on the safe side, miss," said the old man, smiling.
"Very worthy people in other respects are often sadly careless
where poisons are concerned."

She began trifling again with the bottles on the counter, and put
another question, with an ill-concealed anxiety to hear the
answer.

"Is there danger," she asked, "in such a little drop of Laudanum
as that?"

"Ther e is Death in it, miss," replied the chemist, quietly.

"Death to a child, or to a person in delicate health?"

"Death to the strongest man in England, let him be who he may."

With that answer, the chemist sealed up the bottle in its
wrapping of white paper and handed the laudanum to Magdalen
across the counter. She laughed as she took it from him, and paid
for it.

"There will be no fear of accidents at North Shingles," she said.
"I shall keep the bottle locked up in my dressing-case. If it
doesn't relieve the pain, I must come to you again, and try some
other remedy. Good-morning."

"Good-morning, miss."

She went straight back to the house without once looking up,
without noticing any one who passed her. She brushed by Mrs.
Wragge in the passage as she might have brushed by a piece of
furniture. She ascended the stairs, and caught her foot twice in
her dress, from sheer inattention to the common precaution of
holding it up. The trivial daily interests of life had lost their
hold on her already.

In the privacy of her own room, she took the bottle from its
wrapping, and threw the paper and the cotton wool into the
fire-place. At the moment when she did this there was a knock at
the door. She hid the little bottle, and looked up impatiently.
Mrs. Wragge came into the room.

"Have you got something for your toothache, my dear?"

"Yes."

"Can I do anything to help you?"

"No."

Mrs. Wragge still lingered uneasily near the door. Her manner
showed plainly that she had something more to say.

"What is it?" asked Magdalen, sharply.

"Don't be angry," said Mrs. Wragge. "I'm not settled in my mind
about the captain. He's a great writer, and he hasn't written.
He's as quick as lightning, and he hasn't come back. Here's
Saturday, and no signs of him. Has he run away, do you think? Has
anything happened to him?"

"I should think not. Go downstairs; I'll come and speak to you
about it directly."

As soon as she was alone again, Magdalen rose from her chair,
advanced toward a cupboard in the room which locked, and paused
for a moment, with her hand on the key, in doubt. Mrs. Wragge's
appearance had disturbed the whole current of her thoughts. Mrs.
Wragge's last question, trifling as it was, had checked her on
the verge of the precipice -- had roused the old vain hope in her
once more of release by accident.

"Why not?" she said. "Why may something not have happened to one
of them?"

She placed the laudanum in the cupboard, locked it, and put the
key in her packet. "Time enough still," she thought, "before
Monday. I'll wait till the captain comes back."

After some consultation downstairs, it was agreed that the
servant should sit up that night, in expectation of her master's
return. The day passed quietly, without events of any kind.
Magdalen dreamed away the hours over a book. A weary patience of
expectation was all she felt now -- the poignant torment of
thought was dulled and blunted at last. She passed the day and
the evening in the parlor, vaguely conscious of a strange feeling
of aversion to going back to her own room. As the night advanced,
as the noises ceased indoors and out, her restlessness began to
return. She endeavored to quiet herself by reading. Books failed
to fix her attention. The newspaper was lying in a corner of the
room: she tried the newspaper next.

She looked mechanically at the headings of the articles; she
listlessly turned over page after page, until her wandering
attention was arrested by the narrative of an Execution in a
distant part of England. There was nothing to strike her in the
story of the crime, and yet she read it. It was a common,
horribly common, act of bloodshed -- the murder of a woman in
farm-service by a man in the same employment who was jealous of
her. He had been convicted on no extraordinary evidence, he had
been hanged under no unusual circumstances. He had made his
confession, when he knew there was no hope for him, like other
criminals of his class, and the newspaper had printed it at the
end of the article, in these terms:

"I kept company with the deceased for a year or thereabouts. I
said I would marry her when I had money enough. She said I had
money enough now. We had a quarrel. She refused to walk out with
me any more; she wouldn't draw me my beer; she took up with my
fellow-servant, David Crouch. I went to her on the Saturday, and
said I would marry her as soon as we could be asked in church if
she would give up Crouch. She laughed at me. She turned me out of
the wash-house, and the rest of them saw her turn me out. I was
not easy in my mind. I went and sat on the gate -- the gate in
the meadow they call Pettit's Piece. I thought I would shoot her.
I went and fetched my gun and loaded it. I went out into Pettit's
Piece again. I was hard put to it to make up my mind. I thought I
would try my luck -- I mean try whether to kill her or not -- -by
throwing up the Spud of the plow into the air. I said to myself,
if it falls flat, I'll spare her; if it falls point in the earth,
I'll kill her. I took a good swing with it, and shied it up. It
fell point in the earth. I went and shot her. It was a bad job,
but I did it. I did it, as they said I did it at the trial. I
hope the Lord will have mercy on me. I wish my mother to have my
old clothes. I have no more to say."

In the happier days of her life, Magdalen would have passed over
the narrative of the execution, and the printed confession which
accompanied it unread; the subject would have failed to attract
her. She read the horrible story now -read it with an interest
unintelligible to herself. Her attention, which had wandered over
higher and better things, followed every sentence of the
murderer's hideously direct confession from beginning to end. If
the man or the woman had been known to her, if the place had been
familiar to her memory, she could hardly have followed the
narrative more closely, or have felt a more distinct impression
of it left on her mind. She laid down the paper, wondering at
herself; she took it up once more, and tried to read some other
portion of the contents. The effort was useless; her attention
wandered again. She threw the paper away, and went out into the
garden. The night was dark; the stars were few and faint. She
could just see the gravel-walk -- she could just pace backward
and forward between the house door and the gate.

The confession in the newspaper had taken a fearful hold on her
mind. As she paced the walk, the black night opened over the sea,
and showed her the murderer in the field hurling the Spud of the
plow into the air. She ran, shuddering, back to the house. The
murderer followed her into the parlor. She seized the candle and
went up into her room. The vision of her own distempered fancy
followed her to the place where the laudanum was hidden, and
vanished there.

It was midnight, and there was no sign yet of the captain's
return.

She took from the writing-case the long letter which she had
written to Norah, and slowly read it through. The letter quieted
her. When she reached the blank space left at the end, she
hurriedly turned back and began it over again.

One o'clock struck from the church clock, and still the captain
never appeared.

She read the letter for the second time; she turned back
obstinately, despairingly, and began it for the third time. As
she once more reached the last page, she looked at her watch. It
was a quarter to two. She had just put the watch back in the belt
of her dress, when there came to her -- far off in the stillness
of the morning -- a sound of wheels.

She dropped the letter and clasped her cold hands in her lap and
listened. The sound came on, faster and faster, nearer and nearer
-- the trivial sound to all other ears; the sound of Doom to
hers. It passed the side of the house; it traveled a little
further on; it stopped. She heard a loud knocking -- then the
opening of a window -- then voices -- then a long silence -- than
the wheels again coming back -- then the opening of the door
below, and the sound of the captain's voice in the passage.

She could endure  it no longer. She opened her door a little way
and called to him.

He ran upstairs instantly, astonish ed that she was not in bed.
She spoke to him through the narrow opening of the door, keeping
herself hidden behind it, for she was afraid to let him see her
face.

"Has anything gone wrong?" she asked.

"Make your mind easy," he answered. "Nothing has gone wrong."

"Is no accident likely to happen between this and Monday?"

"None whatever. The marriage is a certainty."

"A certainty?"

"Yes."

"Good-night."

She put her hand out through the door. He took it with some
little surprise; it was not often in his experience that she gave
him her hand of her own accord.

"You have sat up too long," he said, as he felt the clasp of her
cold fingers. "I am afraid you will have a bad night -- I'm
afraid you will not sleep."

She softly closed the door.

"I shall sleep," she said, "sounder than you think for."

It was past two o'clock when she shut herself up alone in her
room. Her chair stood in its customary place by the toilet-table.
She sat down for a few minutes thoughtfully, then opened her
letter to Norah, and turned to the end where the blank space was
left. The last lines written above the space ran thus: ". . . I
have laid my whole heart bare to you; I have hidden nothing. It
has come to this. The end I have toiled for, at such terrible
cost to myself, is an end which I must reach or die. It is
wickedness, madness, what you will -- but it is so. There are now
two journeys before me to choose between. If I can marry him --
the journey to the church. If the profanation of myself is more
than I can bear -- the journey to the grave!"

Under that last sentence, she wrote these lines:

"My choice is made. If the cruel law will let you, lay me with my
father and mother in the churchyard at home. Farewell, my love!
Be always innocent; be always happy. If Frank ever asks about me,
say I died forgiving him. Don't grieve long for me, Norah -- I am
not worth it."

She sealed the letter, and addressed it to her sister. The tears
gathered in her eyes as she laid it on the table. She waited
until her sight was clear again, and then took the banknotes once
more from the little bag in her bosom. After wrapping them in a
sheet of note paper, she wrote Captain Wragge's name on the
inclosure, and added these words below it: "Lock the door of my
room, and leave me till my sister comes. The money I promised you
is in this. You are not to blame; it is my fault, and mine only.
If you have any friendly remembrance of me, be kind to your wife
for my sake."

After placing the inclosure by the letter to Norah, she rose and
looked round the room. Some few little things in it were not in
their places. She set them in order, and drew the curtains on
either side at the head of her bed. Her own dress was the next
object of her scrutiny. It was all as neat, as pure, as prettily
arranged as ever. Nothing about her was disordered but her hair.
Some tresses had fallen loose on one side of her head; she
carefully put them back in their places with the help of her
glass. "How pale I look!" she thought, with a faint smile. "Shall
I be paler still when they find me in the morning?"

She went straight to the place where the laudanum was hidden, and
took it out. The bottle was so small that it lay easily in the
palm of her hand. She let it remain there for a little while, and
stood looking at it.

"DEATH!" she said. "In this drop of brown drink -- DEATH!"

As the words passed her lips, an agony of unutterable horror
seized on her in an instant. She crossed the room unsteadily,
with a maddening confusion in her head, with a suffocating
anguish at her heart. She caught at the table to support herself.
The faint clink of the bottle, as it fell harmlessly from her
loosened grasp and rolled against some porcelain object on the
table, struck through her brain like the stroke of a knife. The
sound of her own voice, sunk to a whisper -- her voice only
uttering that one word, Death -- rushed in her ears like the
rushing of a wind. She dragged herself to the bedside, and rested
her head against it, sitting on the floor. "Oh, my life! my
life!" she thought; "what is my life worth, that I cling to it
like this?"

An interval passed, and she felt her strength returning. She
raised herself on her knees and hid her face on the bed. She
tried to pray -- to pray to be forgiven for seeking the refuge of
death. Frantic words burst from her lips -words which would have
risen to cries, if she had not stifled them in the bed-clothes.
She started to her feet; despair strengthened her with a headlong
fury against herself. In one moment she was back at the table; in
another, the poison was once more in her hand.

She removed the cork and lifted the bottle to her mouth.

At the first cold touch of the glass on her lips, her strong
young life leaped up in her leaping blood, and fought with the
whole frenzy of its loathing against the close terror of Death.
Every active power in the exuberant vital force that was in her
rose in revolt against the destruction which her own will would
fain have wreaked on her own life. She paused: for the second
time, she paused in spite of herself. There, in the glorious
perfection of her youth and health -- there, trembling on the
verge of human existence, she stood; with the kiss of the
Destroyer close at her lips, and Nature, faithful to its sacred
trust, fighting for the salvation of her to the last.

No word passed her lips. Her cheeks flushed deep; her breath came
thick and fast. With the poison still in her hand, with the sense
that she might faint in another moment, she made for the window,
and threw back the curtain that covered it.

The new day had risen. The broad gray dawn flowed in on her, over
the quiet eastern sea.

She saw the waters heaving, large and silent, in the misty calm;
she felt the fresh breath of the morning flutter cool on her
face. Her strength returned; her mind cleared a little. At the
sight of the sea, her memory recalled the walk in the garden
overnight, and the picture which her distempered fancy had
painted on the black void. In thought, she saw the picture again
-- the murderer hurling the Spud of the plow into the air, and
setting the life or death of the woman who had deserted him on
the hazard of the falling point. The infection of that terrible
superstition seized on her mind as suddenly as the new day had
burst on her view. The premise of release which she saw in it
from the horror of her own hesitation roused the last energies of
her despair. She resolved to end the struggle by setting her life
or death on the hazard of a chance.

On what chance?

The sea showed it to her. Dimly distinguishable through the mist,
she saw a little fleet of coasting-vessels slowly drifting toward
the house, all following the same direction with the favoring set
of the tide. In half an hour -- perhaps in less -- the fleet
would have passed her window. The hands of her watch pointed to
four o'clock. She seated herself close at the side of the window,
with her back toward the quarter from which the vessels were
drifting down on her -- with the poison placed on the window-sill
and the watch on her lap. For one half-hour to come she
determined to wait there and count the vessels as they went by.
If in that time an even number passed her, the sign given should
be a sign to live. If the uneven number prevailed, the end should
be Death.

With that final resolution, she rested her head against the
window and waited for the ships to pass.

The first came, high, dark and near in the mist, gliding silently
over the silent sea. An interval -- and the second followed, with
the third close after it. Another interval, longer and longer
drawn out -- and nothing passed. She looked at her watch. Twelve
minutes, and three ships. Three.

The fourth came, slower than the rest, larger than the rest,
further off in the mist than the rest. The interval followed; a
long interval once more. Then the next vessel passed, darkest and
nearest of all. Five. The next uneven number -

Five.

She looked at her watch again. Nineteen minutes, and five ships.
Twenty minutes. Twenty-one,  two, three -- and no sixth vessel.
Twenty-four, and the sixth came by. Twenty-five, twenty-six,
twenty- seven, twenty-eight, and the next uneven number -- the
fatal Seven -- glided into view. Two minutes to the end of the
half-hour. And seven ships.

Twenty-nine, and nothing followed in the wake of the seventh
ship. The minute-hand of the watch moved on half-way to thirty,
and still the white heaving sea was a misty blank. Without moving
her head from the window, she took the poison in one hand, and
raised the watch in the other. As the quick seconds counted each
other out, her eyes, as quick as they, looked from the watch to
the sea, from the sea to the watch -- looked for the last time at
the sea -- and saw the EIGHTH ship.

She never moved, she never spoke. The death of thought, the death
of feeling, seemed to have come to her already. She put back the
poison mechanically on the ledge of the window and watched, as in
a dream, the ship gliding smoothly on its silent way -- gliding
till it melted dimly into shadow -- gliding till it was lost in
the mist.

The strain on her mind relaxed when the Messenger of Life had
passed from her sight.

"Providence?" she whispered faintly to herself. "Or chance?"

Her eyes closed, and her head fell back. When the sense of life
returned to her, the morning sun was warm on her face -- the blue
heaven looked down on her -and the sea was a sea of gold.

She fell on her knees at the window and burst into tears.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Toward noon that day, the captain, waiting below stairs, and
hearing no movement in Magdalen's room, felt uneasy at the long
silence. He desired the new maid to follow him upstairs, and,
pointing to the door, told her to go in softly and see whether
her mistress was awake.

The maid entered the room, remained there a moment, and came out
again, closing the door gently.

"She looks beautiful, sir," said the girl; "and she's sleeping as
quietly as a new-born child."

CHAPTER XIV.

THE morning of her husband's return to North Shingles was a
morning memorable forever in the domestic calendar of Mrs.
Wragge. She dated from that occasion the first announcement which
reached her of Magdalen's marriage.

It had been Mrs. Wragge's earthly lot to pass her life in a state
of perpetual surprise. Never yet, however, had she wandered in
such a maze of astonishment as the maze in which she lost herself
when the captain coolly told her the truth. She had been sharp
enough to suspect Mr. Noel Vanstone of coming to the house in the
character of a sweetheart on approval; and she had dimly
interpreted certain expressions of impatience which had fallen
from Magdalen's lips as boding ill for the success of his suit,
but her utmost penetration had never reached as far as a
suspicion of the impending marriage. She rose from one climax of
amazement to another, as her husband proceeded with his
disclosure. A wedding in the family at a day's notice! and that
wedding Magdalen's! and not a single new dress ordered for
anybody, the bride included! and the Oriental Cashmere Robe
totally unavailable on the occasion when she might have worn it
to the greatest advantage! Mrs. Wragge dropped crookedly into a
chair, and beat her disorderly hands on her unsymmetrical knees,
in utter forgetfulness of the captain's presence and the
captain's terrible eye. It would not have surprised her to hear
that the world had come to an end, and that the only mortal whom
Destiny had overlooked, in winding up the affairs of this earthly
planet, was herself!

Leaving his wife to recover her composure by her own unaided
efforts, Captain Wragge withdrew to wait for Magdalen's
appearance in the lower regions of the house. It was close on one
o'clock before the sound of footsteps in the room above warned
him that she was awake and stirring. He called at once for the
maid (whose name he had ascertained to be Louisa), and sent her
upstairs to her mistress for the second time.

Magdalen was standing by her dressing-table when a faint tap at
the door suddenly roused her. The tap was followed by the sound
of a meek voice, which announced itself as the voice of "her
maid," and inquired if Miss Bygrave needed any assistance that
morning.

"Not at present," said Magdalen, as soon as she had recovered the
surprise of finding herself unexpectedly provided with an
attendant. "I will ring when I want you."

After dismissing the woman with that answer, she accidentally
looked from the door to the window. Any speculations on the
subject of the new servant in which she might otherwise have
engaged were instantly suspended by the sight of the bottle of
laudanum, still standing on the ledge of the window, where she
had left it at sunrise. She took it once more in her hand, with a
strange confusion of feeling -- with a vague doubt even yet,
whether the sight of it reminded her of a terrible reality or a
terrible dream. Her first impulse was to rid herself of it on the
spot. She raised the bottle to throw the contents out of the
window, and paused, in sudden distrust of the impulse that had
come to her. "I have accepted my new life," she thought. "How do
I know what that life may have in store for me?" She turned from
the window and went back to the table. "I may be forced to drink
it yet," she said, and put the laudanum into her dressing-case.

Her mind was not at ease when she had done this: there seemed to
be some indefinable ingratitude in the act. Still she made no
attempt to remove the bottle from its hiding-place. She hurried
on her toilet; she hastened the time when she could ring for the
maid, and forget herself and her waking thoughts in a new
subject. After touching the bell, she took from the table her
letter to Norah and her letter to the captain, put them both into
her dressing-case with the laudanum, and locked it securely with
the key which she kept attached to her watch-chain.

Magdalen's first impression of her attendant was not an agreeable
one. She could not investigate the girl with the experienced eye
of the landlady at the London hotel, who had characterized the
stranger as a young person overtaken by misfortune, and who had
showed plainly, by her look and manner, of what nature she
suspected that misfortune to be. But with this drawback, Magdalen
was perfectly competent to detect the tokens of sickness and
sorrow lurking under the surface of the new maid's activity and
politeness. She suspected the girl was ill-tempered; she disliked
her name; and she was indisposed to welcome any servant who had
been engaged by Noel Vanstone. But after the first few minutes,
"Louisa" grew on her liking. She answered all the questions put
to her with perfect directness; she appeared to understand her
duties thoroughly; and she never spoke until she was spoken to
first. After making all the inquiries that occurred to her at the
time, and after determining to give the maid a fair trial,
Magdalen rose to leave the room. The very air in it was still
heavy to her with the oppression of the past night.

"Have you anything more to say to me?" she asked, turning to the
servant, with her hand on the door.

"I beg your pardon, miss," said Louisa, very respectfully and
very quietly. "I think my master told me that the marriage was to
be to-morrow?"

Magdalen repressed the shudder that stole over her at that
reference to the marriage on the lips of a stranger, and answered
in the affirmative.

"It's a very short time, miss, to prepare in. If you would be so
kind as to give me my orders about the packing before you go
downstairs -- ?"

"There are no such preparations to make as you suppose," said
Magdalen, hastily. "The few things I have here can be all packed
at once, if you like. I shall wear the same dress to-morrow which
I have on to-day. Leave out the straw bonnet and the light shawl,
and put everything else into my boxes. I have no new dresses to
pack; I have nothing ordered for the occasion of any sort." She
tried to add some commonplace phrases of explanation, accounting
as probably as might be for the absence of the usual wedding
outfit and wedding-dress. But no further reference to the
marriage would pass her lips, and without an other word she
abruptly left the room.

The meek and melancholy Louisa stood lost in astonishment. "Somet
hing wrong here," she thought. "I'm half afraid of my new place
already." She sighed resignedly, shook her head, and went to the
wardrobe. She first examined the drawers underneath, took out the
various articles of linen laid inside, and placed them on chairs.
Opening the upper part of the wardrobe next, she ranged the
dresses in it side by side on the bed. Her last proceeding was to
push the empty boxes into the middle of the room, and to compare
the space at her disposal with the articles of dress which she
had to pack. She completed her preliminary calculations with the
ready self-reliance of a woman who thoroughly understood her
business, and began the packing forthwith. Just as she had placed
the first article of linen in the smaller box, the door of the
room opened, and the house-servant, eager for gossip, came in.

"What do you want?" asked Louisa, quietly.

"Did you ever hear of anything like this!" said the
house-servant, entering on her subject immediately.

"Like what?"

"Like this marriage, to be sure. You're London bred, they tell
me. Did you ever hear of a young lady being married without a
single new thing to her back? No wedding veil, and no wedding
breakfast, and no wedding favors for the servants. It's flying in
the face of Providence -- that's what I say. I'm only a poor
servant, I know. But it's wicked, downright wicked -- and I don't
care who hears me!"

Louisa went on with the packing.

"Look at her dresses!" persisted the house-servant, waving her
hand indignantly at the bed. "I'm only a poor girl, but I
wouldn't marry the best man alive without a new gown to my back.
Look here! look at this dowdy brown thing here. Alpaca! You're
not going to pack this Alpaca thing, are you? Why, it's hardly
fit for a servant! I don't know that I'd take a gift of it if it
was offered me. It would do for me if I took it up in the skirt,
and let it out in the waist -and it wouldn't look so bad with a
bit of bright trimming, would it?"

"Let that dress alone, if you please," said Louisa, as quietly as
ever.

"What did you say?" inquired the other, doubting whether her ears
had not deceived her.

"I said, let that dress alone. It belongs to my mistress, and I
have my mistress's orders to pack up everything in the room. You
are not helping me by coming here -- you are very much in my
way."

"Well!" said the house-servant, "you may be London bred, as they
say. But if these are your London manners, give me Suffolk!" She
opened the door with an angry snatch at the handle, shut it
violently, opened it again, and looked in. "Give me Suffolk!"
said the house-servant, with a parting nod of her head to point
the edge of her sarcasm.

Louisa proceeded impenetrably with her packing up.

Having neatly disposed of the linen in the smaller box, she
turned her attention to the dresses next. After passing them
carefully in review, to ascertain which was the least valuable of
the collection, and to place that one at the bottom of the trunk
for the rest to lie on, she made her choice with very little
difficulty. The first gown which she put into the box was -- the
brown Alpaca dress.

Meanwhile Magdalen had joined the captain downstairs. Although he
could not fail to notice the languor in her face and the
listlessness of all her movements, he was relieved to find that
she met him with perfect composure. She was even self-possessed
enough to ask him for news of his journey, with no other signs of
agitation than a passing change of color and a little trembling
of the lips.

"So much for the past," said Captain Wragge, when his narrative
of the expedition to London by way of St. Crux had come to an
end. "Now for the present. The bridegroom -- "

"If it makes no difference," she interposed, "call him Mr. Noel
Vanstone."

"With all my heart. Mr. Noel Vanstone is coming here this
afternoon to dine and spend the evening. He will be tiresome in
the last degree; but, like all tiresome people, he is not to be
got rid of on any terms. Before he comes, I have a last word or
two of caution for your private ear. By this time to-morrow we
shall have parted -- without any certain knowledge, on either
side, of our ever meeting again. I am anxious to serve your
interests faithfully to the last; I am anxious you should feel
that I have done all I could for your future security when we say
good-by."

Magdalen looked at him in surprise. He spoke in altered tones. He
was agitated; he was strangely in earnest. Something in his look
and manner took her memory back to the first night at Aldborough,
when she had opened her mind to him in the darkening solitude --
when they two had sat together alone on the slope of the martello
tower. "I have no reason to think otherwise than kindly of you,"
she said.

Captain Wragge suddenly left his chair, and took a turn backward
and forward in the room. Magdalen's last words seemed to have
produced some extraordinary disturbance in him.

"Damn it!" he broke out; "I can't let you say that. You have
reason to think ill of me. I have cheated you. You never got your
fair share of profit from the Entertainment, from first to last.
There! now the murder's out!"

Magdalen smiled, and signed to him to come back to his chair.

"I know you cheated me," she said, quietly. "You were in the
exercise of your profession, Captain Wragge. I expected it when I
joined you. I made no complaint at the time, and I make none now.
If the money you took is any recompense for all the trouble I
have given you, you are heartily welcome to it."

"Will you shake hands on that?" asked the captain, with an
awkwardness and hesitation strongly at variance with his
customary ease of manner.

Magdalen gave him her hand. He wrung it hard. "You are a strange
girl," he said, trying to speak lightly. "You have laid a hold on
me that I don't quite understand. I'm half uncomfortable at
taking the money from you now; and yet you don't want it, do
you?" He hesitated. "I almost wish," he said, "I had never met
you on the Walls of York."

"It is too late to wish that, Captain Wragge. Say no more. You
only distress me -- say no more. We have other subjects to talk
about. What were those words of caution which you had for my
private ear?"

The captain took another turn in the room, and struggled back
again into his every-day character. He produced from his
pocketbook Mrs. Lecount's letter to her master, and handed it to
Magdalen.

"There is the letter that might have ruined us if it had ever
reached its address," he said. "Read it carefully. I have a
question to ask you when you have done."

Magdalen read the letter. "What is this proof," she inquired,
"which Mrs. Lecount relies on so confidently!"

"The very question I was going to ask you," said Captain Wragge.
"Consult your memory of what happened when you tried that
experiment in Vauxhall Walk. Did Mrs. Lecount get no other chance
against you than the chances you have told me of already?"

"She discovered that my face was disguised, and she heard me
speak in my own voice."

"And nothing more?"

"Nothing more."

"Very good. Then my interpretation of the letter is clearly the
right one. The proof Mrs. Lecount relies on is my wife's infernal
ghost story -- which is, in plain English, the story of Miss
Bygrave having been seen in Miss Vanstone's disguise; the witness
being the very person who is afterward presented at Aldborough in
the character of Miss Bygrave's aunt. An excellent chance for
Mrs. Lecount, if she can only lay her hand at the right time on
Mrs. Wragge, and no chance at all, if she can't. Make your mind
easy on that point. Mrs. Lecount and my wife have seen the last
of each other. In the meantime, don't neglect the warning I give
you, in giving you this letter. Tear it up, for fear of
accidents, but don't forget it."

"Trust me to remember it, "replied Magdalen, destroying the
letter while she spoke. "Have you anything more to tell me?"

"I have some information to give you," said Captain Wragge,
"which may be useful, because it relates  to your future
security. Mind, I want to know nothing about your proceedings
when to-morrow is over; we settled that when we first discussed
this matter. I ask no questions, and I make no guesses. All I
want to do now is to warn you of your legal position after your
marriage, and to leave you to make what use you please of your
knowledge, at your own sole discretion. I took a lawyer's opinion
on the point when I was in London, thinking it might be useful to
you."

"It is sure to be useful. What did the lawyer say?"

"To put it plainly, this is what he said. If Mr. Noel Vanstone
ever discovers that you have knowingly married him under a false
name, he can apply to the Ecclesiastical Court to have his
marriage declared null and void. The issue of the application
would rest with the judges. But if he could prove that he had
been intentionally deceived, the legal opinion is that his case
would be a strong one."

"Suppose I chose to apply on my side?" said Magdalen, eagerly.
"What then?"

"You might make the application," replied the captain. "But
remember one thing -- you would come into Court with the
acknowledgment of your own deception. I leave you to imagine what
the judges would think of that."

"Did the lawyer tell you anything else?"

"One thing besides," said Captain Wragge. "Whatever the law might
do with the marriage in the lifetime of both the parties to it --
on the death of either one of them, no application made by the
survivor would avail; and, as to the case of that survivor, the
marriage would remain valid. You understand? If he dies, or if
you die -- and if no application has been made to the Court -- he
the survivor, or you the survivor, would have no power of
disputing the marriage. But in the lifetime of both of you, if he
claimed to have the marriage dissolved, the chances are all in
favor of his carrying his point."

He looked at Magdalen with a furtive curiosity as he said those
words. She turned her head aside, absently tying her watch-chain
into a loop and untying it again, evidently thinking with the
closest attention over what he had last said to her. Captain
Wragge walked uneasily to the window and looked out. The first
object that caught his eye was Mr. Noel Vanstone approaching from
Sea View. He returned instantly to his former place in the room,
and addressed himself to Magdalen once more.

"Here is Mr. Noel Vanstone," he said. "One last caution before he
comes in. Be on your guard with him about your age. He put the
question to me before he got the License. I took the shortest way
out of the difficulty, and told him you were twenty-one, and he
made the declaration accordingly. Never mind about _me_; after
to-morrow I am invisible. But, in your own interests, don't
forget, if the subject turns up, that you were of age when you
were married. There is nothing more. You are provided with every
necessary warning that I can give you. Whatever happens in the
future, remember I have done my best."

He hurried to the door without waiting for an answer, and went
out into the garden to receive his guest.

Noel Vanstone made his appearance at the gate, solemnly carrying
his bridal offering to North Shingles with both hands. The object
in question was an ancient casket (one of his father's bargains);
inside the casket reposed an old-fashioned carbuncle brooch, set
in silver (another of his father's bargains) -- bridal presents
both, possessing the inestimable merit of leaving his money
undisturbed in his pocket. He shook his head portentously when
the captain inquired after his health and spirits. He had passed
a wakeful night; ungovernable apprehensions of Lecount's sudden
re-appearance had beset him as soon as he found himself alone at
Sea View. Sea View was redolent of Lecount: Sea View (though
built on piles, and the strongest house in England) was
henceforth odious to him. He had felt this all night; he had also
felt his responsibilities. There was the lady's maid, to begin
with. Now he had hired her, he began to think she wouldn't do.
She might fall sick on his hands; she might have deceived him by
a false character; she and the landlady of the hotel might have
been in league together. Horrible! Really horrible to think of.
Then there was the other responsibility -- perhaps the heavier of
the two -- the responsibility of deciding where he was to go and
spend his honeymoon to-morrow. He would have preferred one of his
father's empty houses: But except at Vauxhall Walk (which he
supposed would be objected to), and at Aldborough (which was of
course out of the question) all the houses were let. He would put
himself in Mr. Bygrave's hands. Where had Mr. Bygrave spent his
own honeymoon? Given the British Islands to choose from, where
would Mr. Bygrave pitch his tent, on a careful review of all the
circumstances?

At this point the bridegroom's questions suddenly came to an end,
and the bridegroom's face exhibited an expression of ungovernable
astonishment. His judicious friend, whose advice had been at his
disposal in every other emergency, suddenly turned round on him,
in the emergency of the honeymoon, and flatly declined discussing
the subject.

"No!" said the captain, as Noel Vanstone opened his lips to plead
for a hearing, "you must really excuse me. My point of view in
this matter is, as usual, a peculiar one. For some time past I
have been living in an atmosphere of deception, to suit your
convenience. That atmosphere, my good sir, is getting close; my
Moral Being requires ventilation. Settle the choice of a locality
with my niece, and leave me, at my particular request, in total
ignorance of the subject. Mrs. Lecount is certain to come here on
her return from Zurich, and is certain to ask me where you are
gone. You may think it strange, Mr. Vanstone; but when I tell her
I don't know, I wish to enjoy the unaccustomed luxury of feeling,
for once in a way, that I am speaking the truth!"

With those words, he opened the sitting-room door, introduced
Noel Vanstone to Magdalen's presence, bowed himself out of the
room again, and set forth alone to while away the rest of the
afternoon by taking a walk. His face showed plain tokens of
anxiety, and his party-colored eyes looked hither and thither
distrustfully, as he sauntered along the shore. "The time hangs
heavy on our hands," thought the captain. "I wish to-morrow was
come and gone."

The day passed and nothing happened; the evening and the night
followed, placidly and uneventfully. Monday came, a cloudless,
lovely day; Monday confirmed the captain's assertion that the
marriage was a certainty. Toward ten o'clock, the clerk,
ascending the church steps quoted the old proverb to the
pew-opener, meeting him under the porch: "Happy the bride on whom
the sun shines!"

In a quarter of an hour more the wedding-party was in the vestry,
and the clergyman led the way to the altar. Carefully as the
secret of the marriage had been kept, the opening of the church
in the morning had been enough to betray it. A small
congregation, almost entirely composed of women, were scattered
here and there among the pews. Kirke's sister and her children
were staying with a friend at Aldborough, and Kirke's sister was
one of the congregation.

As the wedding-party entered the church, the haunting terror of
Mrs. Lecount spread from Noel Vanstone to the captain. For the
first few minutes, the eyes of both of them looked among the
women in the pews with the same searching scrutiny, and looked
away again with the same sense of relief. The clergyman noticed
that look, and investigated the License more closely than usual.
The clerk began to doubt privately whether the old proverb about
the bride was a proverb to be always depended on. The female
members of the congregation murmured among themselves at the
inexcusable disregard of appearances implied in the bride's
dress. Kirke's sister whispered venomously in her friend's ear,
"Thank God for to-day for Robert's sake." Mrs. Wragge cried
silently, with the dread of some threatening calamity she knew
not what. The one person present who remained outwardly
undisturbed was Magdalen herself. She stood, with tearless
resignation, in her place before the altar -- stood, as if all
the sources of human emotion were frozen up within her.

T he clergyman opened the Book.

*      *      *      *      *      *      *

It was done. The awful words which speak from earth to Heaven
were pronounced. The children of the two dead brothers --
inheritors of the implacable enmity which had parted their
parents -- were Man and Wife.

From that moment events hurried with a headlong rapidity to the
parting scene. They were back at the house while the words of the
Marriage Service seemed still ringing in their ears. Before they
had been five minutes indoors the carriage drew up at the garden
gate. In a minute more the opportunity came for which Magdalen
and the captain had been on the watch -- the opportunity of
speaking together in private for the last time. She still
preserved her icy resignation; she seemed beyond all reach now of
the fear that had once mastered her, of the remorse that had once
tortured her soul. With a firm hand she gave him the promised
money. With a firm face she looked her last at him. "I'm not to
blame," he whispered, eagerly; "I have only done what you asked
me." She bowed her head; she bent it toward him kindly and let
him touch her fore-head with his lips. "Take care!" he said. "My
last words are -- for God's sake take care when I'm gone!" She
turned from him with a smile, and spoke her farewell words to his
wife. Mrs. Wragge tried hard to face her loss bravely -- the loss
of the friend whose presence had fallen like light from Heaven
over the dim pathway of her life. "You have been very good to me,
my dear; I thank you kindly; I thank you with all my heart." She
could say no more; she clung to Magdalen in a passion of tears,
as her mother might have clung to her, if her mother had lived to
see that horrible day. "I'm frightened for you!" cried the poor
creature, in a wild, wailing voice. "Oh, my darling, I'm
frightened for you!" Magdalen desperately drew herself free --
kissed her -- and hurried out to the door. The expression of that
artless gratitude, the cry of that guileless love, shook her as
nothing else had shaken her that day. It was a refuge to get to
the carriage -- a refuge, though the man she had married stood
there waiting for her at the door.

Mrs. Wragge tried to follow her into the garden. But the captain
had seen Magdalen's face as she ran out, and he steadily held his
wife back in the passage. From that distance the last farewells
were exchanged. As long as the carriage was in sight, Magdalen
looked back at them; she waved her handkerchief as she turned the
corner. In a moment more the last thread which bound her to them
was broken; the familiar companionship of many months was a thing
of the past already!

Captain Wragge closed the house door on the idlers who were
looking in from the Parade. He led his wife back into the
sitting-room, and spoke to her with a forbearance which she had
never yet experienced from him.

"She has gone her way," he said, "and in another hour we shall
have gone ours. Cry your cry out -- I don't deny she's worth
crying for."

Even then -- even when the dread of Magdalen's future was at its
darkest in his mind -- the ruling habit of the man's life clung
to him. Mechanically he unlocked his dispatch-box. Mechanically
he opened his Book of Accounts, and made the closing entry -- the
entry of his last transaction with Magdalen -- in black and
white. "By Rec'd from Miss Vanstone," wrote the captain, with a
gloomy brow, "Two hundred pounds."

"You won't be angry with me?" said Mrs. Wragge, looking timidly
at her husband through her tears. "I want a word of comfort,
captain. Oh, do tell me, when shall I see her again?"

The captain closed the book, and answered in one inexorable word:
"Never!"

Between eleven and twelve o'clock that night Mrs. Lecount drove
into Zurich.

Her brother's house, when she stopped before it, was shut up.
With some difficulty and delay the servant was aroused. She held
up her hands in speechless amazement when she opened the door and
saw who the visitor was.

"Is my brother alive?" asked Mrs. Lecount, entering the house.

"Alive!" echoed the servant. "He has gone holiday-making into the
country, to finish his recovery in the fine fresh air."

The housekeeper staggered back against the wall of the passage.
The coachman and the servant put her into a chair. Her face was
livid, and her teeth chattered in her head.

"Send for my brother's doctor," she said, as soon as she could
speak.

The doctor came. She handed him a letter before he could say a
word.

"Did you write that letter?"

He looked it over rapidly, and answered her without hesitation,

"Certainly not!"

"It is your handwriting."

"It is a forgery of my handwriting."

She rose from the chair with a new strength in her.

"When does the return mail start for Paris?" she asked.

"In half an hour."

"Send instantly and take me a place in it!"

The servant hesitated, the doctor protested. She turned a deaf
ear to them both.

"Send!" she reiterated, "or I will go myself."

They obeyed. The servant went to take the place: the doctor
remained and held a conversation with Mrs. Lecount. When the
half-hour had passed, he helped her into her place in the mail,
and charged the conductor privately to take care of his
passenger.

"She has traveled from England without stopping," said the
doctor; "and she is traveling back again without rest. Be careful
of her, or she will break down under the double journey."

The mail started. Before the first hour of the new day was at an
end Mrs. Lecount was on her way back to England.

THE END OF THE FOURTH SCENE.

BETWEEN THE SCENES.

PROGRESS OF THE STORY THROUGH THE POST.

I.

_From George Bartram to Noel Vanstone._

"St. Crux, September 4th, 1847.

"MY DEAR NOEL -- Here are two plain questions at starting. In the
name of all that is mysterious, what are you hiding for? And why
is everything relating to your marriage kept an impenetrable
secret from your oldest friends?

"I have been to Aldborough to try if I could trace you from that
place, and have come back as wise as I went. I have applied to
your lawyer in London, and have been told, in reply, that you
have forbidden him to disclose the place of your retreat to any
one without first receiving your permission to do so. All I could
prevail on him to say was, that he would forward any letter which
might be sent to his care. I write accordingly, and mind this, I
expect an answer.

"You may ask, in your ill-tempered way, what business I have to
meddle with affairs of yours which it is your pleasure to keep
private. My dear Noel, there is a serious reason for our opening
communications with you from this house. You don't know what
events have taken place at St. Crux since you ran away to get
married; and though I detest writing letters, I must lose an
hour's shooting to-day in trying to enlighten you.

"On the twenty-third of last month, the admiral and I were
disturbed over our wine after dinner by the announcement that a
visitor had unexpectedly arrived at St. Crux. Who do you think
the visitor was? Mrs. Lecount!

"My uncle, with that old-fashioned bachelor gallantry of his
which pays equal respect to all wearers of petticoats, left the
table directly to welcome Mrs. Lecount. While I was debating
whether I should follow him or not, my meditations were suddenly
brought to an end by a loud call from the admiral. I ran into the
morning-room, and there was your unfortunate housekeeper on the
sofa, with all the women servants about her, more dead than
alive. She had traveled from England to Zurich, and from Zurich
back again to England, without stopping; and she looked,
seriously and literally, at death's door. I immediately agreed
with my uncle that the first thing to be done was to send for
medical help. We dispatched a groom on the spot, and, at Mrs.
Lecount's own request, sent all the servants in a body out of the
room.

"As soon as we were alone, Mrs. Lecount surprised us by a
singular question. She asked if you had received a letter which
she had addressed to you before leaving England at this house.
When we told her that the letter had been forwarded, under cover
to your friend Mr. Bygrave, by your own particular request, she
turned as pale as ashes; and when we added that you had left us
in company with this same Mr. Bygrave, she clasped her hands and
stared
at us as if she had taken leave of her senses. Her next question
was, 'Where is Mr. Noel now?' We could only give her one reply --
Mr. Noel had not informed us. She looked perfectly thunderstruck
at that answer. 'He has gone to his ruin!' she said. 'He has gone
away in company with the greatest villain in England. I must find
him! I tell you I must find Mr. Noel! If I don't find him at
once, it will be too late. He will be married!' she burst out
quite frantically. 'On my honor and my oath, he will be married!'
The admiral, incautiously perhaps, but with the best intentions,
told her you were married already. She gave a scream that made
the windows ring again and dropped back on the sofa in a
fainting-fit. The doctor came in the nick of time, and soon
brought her to. But she was taken ill the same night; she has
grown worse and worse ever since; and the last medical report is,
that the fever from which she has been suffering is in a fair way
to settle on her brain.

"Now, my dear Noel, neither my uncle nor I have any wish to
intrude ourselves on your confidence. We are naturally astonished
at the extraordinary mystery which hangs over you and your
marriage, and we cannot be blind to the fact that your
housekeeper has, apparently, some strong reason of her own for
viewing Mrs. Noel Vanstone with an enmity and distrust which we
are quite ready to believe that lady has done nothing to deserve.
Whatever strange misunderstanding there may have been in your
household, is your business (if you choose to keep it to
yourself), and not ours. All we have any right to do is to tell
you what the doctor says. His patient has been delirious; he
declines to answer for her life if she goes on as she is going on
now; and he thinks -- finding that she is perpetually talking of
her master -- that your presence would be useful in quieting her,
if you could come here at once, and exert your influence before
it is too late.

"What do you say? Will you emerge from the darkness that
surrounds you and come to St. Crux? If this was the case of an
ordinary servant, I could understand your hesitating to leave the
delights of your honeymoon for any such object as is here
proposed to you. But, my dear fellow, Mrs. Lecount is not an
ordinary servant. You are under obligations to her fidelity and
attachment in your father's time, as well as in your own; and if
you _can_ quiet the anxieties which seem to be driving this
unfortunate woman mad, I really think you ought to come here and
do so. Your leaving Mrs. Noel Vanstone is of course out of the
question. There is no necessity for any such hard-hearted
proceeding. The admiral desires me to remind you that he is your
oldest friend living, and that his house is at your wife's
disposal, as it has always been at yours. In this great
rambling-place she need dread no near association with the
sick-room; and, with all my uncle's oddities, I am sure she will
not think the offer of his friendship an offer to be despised.

"Have I told you already that I went to Aldborough to try and
find a clew to your whereabouts? I can't be at the trouble of
looking back to see; so, if I have told you, I tell you again.
The truth is, I made an acquaintance at Aldborough of whom you
know something -- at least by report.

"After applying vainly at Sea View, I went to the hotel to
inquire about you. The landlady could give me no information; but
the moment I mentioned your name, she asked if I was related to
you; and when I told her I was your cousin, she said there was a
young lady then at the hotel whose name was Vanstone also, who
was in great distress about a missing relative, and who might
prove of some use to me -- or I to her -- if we knew of each
other's errand at Aldborough. I had not the least idea who she
was, but I sent in my card at a venture; and in five minutes
afterward I found myself in the presence of one of the most
charming women these eyes ever looked on.

"Our first words of explanation informed me that my family name
was known to her by repute. Who do you think she was? The eldest
daughter of my uncle and yours -- Andrew Vanstone. I had often
heard my poor mother in past years speak of her brother Andrew,
and I knew of that sad story at Combe-Raven. But our families, as
you are aware, had always been estranged, and I had never seen my
charming cousin before. She has the dark eyes and hair, and the
gentle, retiring manners that I always admire in a woman. I don't
want to renew our old disagreement about your father's conduct to
those two sisters, or to deny that his brother Andrew may have
behaved badly to him; I am willing to admit that the high moral
position he took in the matter is quite unassailable by such a
miserable sinner as I am; and I will not dispute that my own
spendthrift habits incapacitate me from offering any opinion on
the conduct of other people's pecuniary affairs. But, with all
these allowances and drawbacks, I can tell you one thing, Noel.
If you ever see the elder Miss Vanstone, I venture to prophesy
that, for the first time in your life, you will doubt the
propriety of following your father's example.

"She told me her little story, poor thing, most simply and
unaffectedly. She is now occupying her second situation as a
governess -- and, as usual, I, who know everybody, know the
family. They are friends of my uncle's, whom he has lost sight of
latterly -- the Tyrrels of Portland Place -- and they treat Miss
Vanstone with as much kindness and consideration as if she was a
member of the family. One of their old servants accompanied her
to Aldborough, her object in traveling to that place being what
the landlady of the hotel had stated it to be. The family
reverses have, it seems, had a serious effect on Miss Vanstone's
younger sister, who has left her friends and who has been missing
from home for some time. She had been last heard of at
Aldborough; and her elder sister, on her return from the
Continent with the Tyrrels, had instantly set out to make
inquiries at that place.

"This was all Miss Vanstone told me. She asked whether you had
seen anything of her sister, or whether Mrs. Lecount knew
anything of her sister -- I suppose because she was aware you had
been at Aldborough. Of course I could tell her nothing. She
entered into no details on the subject, and I could not presume
to ask her for any. All I did was to set to work with might and
main to assist her inquiries. The attempt was an utter failure;
nobody could give us any information. We tried personal
description of course; and strange to say, the only young lady
formerly staying at Aldborough who answered the description was,
of all the people in the world, the lady you have married! If she
had not had an uncle and aunt (both of whom have left the place),
I should have begun to suspect that you had married your cousin
without knowing it! Is this the clew to the mystery? Don't be
angry; I must have my little joke, and I can't help writing as
carelessly as I talk. The end of it was, our inquiries were all
baffled, and I traveled back with Miss Vanstone and her attendant
as far as our station here. I think I shall call on the Tyrrels
when I am next in London. I have certainly treated that family
with the most inexcusable neglect.

"Here I am at the end of my third sheet of note-paper! I don't
often take the pen in hand; but when I do, you will agree with me
that I am in no hurry to lay it aside again. Treat the rest of my
letter as you like, but consider what I have told you about Mrs.
Lecount, and remember that time is of consequence.

"Ever yours,

GEORGE BARTRAM.'

II.

_From Norah Vanstone to Miss Garth._

"Portland Place.

"MY DEAR MISS GARTH -- More sorrow, more disappointment! I have
just returned from Aldborough, without making any discovery.
Magdalen is still lost to us.

"I cannot attribute this new overthrow of my hopes to any want of
perseverance or penetration in making the necessary inquiries. My
inexperience in such matters was most kindly and  unexpectedly
assisted by Mr. George Bartram. By a strange coincidence, he
happened  to be at Aldborough, inquiring after Mr. Noel Vanstone,
at the very time when I was there inquiring aft er Magdalen. He
sent in his card, and knowing, when I looked at the name, that he
was my cousin -- if I may call him so -- I thought there would be
no impropriety in my seeing him and asking his advice. I
abstained from entering into particulars for Magdalen's sake, and
I made no allusion to that letter of Mrs. Lecount's which you
answered for me. I only told him Magdalen was missing, and had
been last heard of at Aldborough. The kindness which he showed in
devoting himself to my assistance exceeds all description. He
treated me, in my forlorn situation, with a delicacy and respect
which I shall remember gratefully long after he has himself
perhaps forgotten our meeting altogether. He is quite young --
not more than thirty, I should think. In face and figure, he
reminded me a little of the portrait of my father at Combe-Raven
-- I mean the portrait in the dining-room, of my father when he
was a young man.

"Useless as our inquiries were, there is one result of them which
has left a very strange and shocking impression on my mind.

"It appears that Mr. Noel Vanstone has lately married, under
mysterious circumstances, a young lady whom he met with at
Aldborough, named Bygrave. He has gone away with his wife,
telling nobody but his lawyer where he has gone to. This I heard
from Mr. George Bartram, who was endeavoring to trace him, for
the purpose of communicating the news of his housekeeper's
serious illness -- the housekeeper being the same Mrs. Lecount
whose letter you answered. So far, you may say, there is nothing
which need particularly interest either of us. But I think you
will be as much surprised as I was when I tell you that the
description given by the people at Aldborough of Miss Bygrave's
appearance is most startlingly and unaccountably like the
description of Magdalen's appearance. This discovery, taken in
connection with all the circumstances we know of, has had an
effect on my mind which I cannot describe to you -- which I dare
not realize to myself. Pray come and see me! I have never felt so
wretched about Magdalen as I feel now. Suspense must have
weakened my nerves in some strange way. I feel superstitious
about the slightest things. This accidental resemblance of a
total stranger to Magdalen fills me every now and then with the
most horrible misgivings -- merely because Mr. Noel Vanstone's
name happens to be mixed up with it. Once more, pray come to me;
I have so much to say to you that I cannot, and dare not, say in
writing.

"Gratefully and affectionately yours,

"NORAH."

III.

_From Mr. John Loscombe (Solicitor) to George Bartram, Esq._

"Lincoln's Inn, London, September 6th, 1847.

"SIR -- I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your note, inclosing
a letter addressed to my client, Mr. Noel Vanstone, and
requesting that I will forward the same to Mr. Vanstone's present
address.

"Since I last had the pleasure of communicating with you on this
subject, my position toward my client is entirely altered. Three
days ago I received a letter from him, which stated his intention
of changing his place of residence on the next day then ensuing,
but which left me entirely in ignorance on the subject of the
locality to which it was his intention to remove. I have not
heard from him since; and, as he had previously drawn on me for a
larger sum of money than usual, there would be no present
necessity for his writing to me again -- assuming that it is his
wish to keep his place of residence concealed from every one,
myself included.

"Under these circumstances, I think it right to return you your
letter, with the assurance that I will let you know, if I happen
to be again placed in a position to forward it to its
destination.

Your obedient servant,

"JOHN LOSCOMBE."

IV.

_From Norah Vanstone to Miss Garth._

"Portland Place.

"MY DEAR MISS GARTH -- Forget the letter I wrote to you
yesterday, and all the gloomy forebodings that it contains. This
morning's post has brought new life to me. I have just received a
letter, addressed to me at your house, and forwarded here, in
your absence from home yesterday, by your sister. Can you guess
who the writer is? -- Magdalen!

"The letter is very short; it seems to have been written in a
hurry. She says she has been dreaming of me for some nights past,
and the dreams have made her fear that her long silence has
caused me more distress on her account than she is worth. She
writes, therefore, to assure me that she is safe and well -- that
she hopes to see me before long -- and that she has something to
tell me, when we meet, which will try my sisterly love for her as
nothing has tried it yet. The letter is not dated; but the
postmark is 'Allonby,' which I have found, on referring to the
Gazetteer, to be a little sea-side place in Cumberland. There is
no hope of my being able to write back, for Magdalen expressly
says that she is on the eve of departure from her present
residence, and that she is not at liberty to say where she is
going to next, or to leave instructions for forwarding any
letters after her.

"In happier times I should have thought this letter very far from
being a satisfactory one, and I should have been seriously
alarmed by that allusion to a future confidence on her part which
will try my love for her as nothing has tried it yet. But after
all the suspense I have suffered, the happiness of seeing her
handwriting again seems to fill my heart and to keep all other
feelings out of it. I don't send you her letter, because I know
you are coming to me soon, and I want to have the pleasure of
seeing you read it.

"Ever affectionately yours,

"NORAH.

"P.S. -- Mr. George Bartram called on Mrs. Tyrrel to-day. He
insisted on being introduced to the children. When he was gone,
Mrs. Tyrrel laughed in her good-humored way, and said that his
anxiety to see the children looked, to her mind, very much like
an anxiety to see _me_. You may imagine how my spirits are
improved when I can occupy my pen in writing such nonsense as
this!"

V.

_From Mrs. Lecount to Mr. de Bleriot, General Agent, London._

"St. Crux, October 23d, 1847.

"DEAR SIR -- I have been long in thanking you for the kind letter
which promises me your assistance, in friendly remembrance of the
commercial relations formerly existing between my brother and
yourself. The truth is, I have over-taxed my strength on my
recovery from a long and dangerous illness; and for the last ten
days I have been suffering under a relapse. I am now better
again, and able to enter on the business which you so kindly
offer to undertake for me.

"The person whose present place of abode it is of the utmost
importance to me to discover is Mr. Noel Vanstone. I have lived,
for many years past, in this gentleman's service as house-keeper;
and not having received my formal dismissal, I consider myself in
his service still. During my absence on the Continent he was
privately married at Aldborough, in Suffolk, on the eighteenth of
August last. He left Aldborough the same day, taking his wife
with him to some place of retreat which was kept a secret from
everybody except his lawyer, Mr. Loscombe, of Lincoln's Inn.
After a short time he again removed, on the 4th of September,
without informing Mr. Loscombe, on this occasion, of his new
place of abode. From that date to this the lawyer has remained
(or has pretended to remain) in total ignorance of where he now
is. Application has been made to Mr. Loscombe, under the
circumstances, to mention what that former place of residence
was, of which Mr. Vanstone is known to have informed him. Mr.
Loscombe has declined acceding to this request, for want of
formal permission to disclose his client's proceedings after
leaving Aldborough. I have all these latter particulars from Mr.
Loscombe's correspondent -- the nephew of the gentleman who owns
this house, and whose charity has given me an asylum, during the
heavy affliction of my sickness, under his own roof.

"I believe the reasons which have induced Mr. Noel Vanstone to
keep himself and his wife in hiding are reasons which relate
entirely to myself. In the first p lace, he is aware that the
circumstances under which he has married are such as to give me
the right of
regarding him with a just indignation. In the second place, he
knows that my faithful services, rendered through a period of
twenty years, to his father and to himself, forbid him, in common
decency, to cast me out helpless on the world without a provision
for the end of my life. He is the meanest of living men, and his
wife is the vilest of living women. As long as he can avoid
fulfilling his obligations to me, he will; and his wife's
encouragement may be trusted to fortify him in his ingratitude.

"My object in determining to find him out is briefly this. His
marriage has exposed him to consequences which a man of ten times
his courage could not face without shrinking. Of those
consequences he knows nothing. His wife knows, and keeps him in
ignorance. I know, and can enlighten him. His security from the
danger that threatens him is in my hands alone; and he shall pay
the price of his rescue to the last farthing of the debt that
justice claims for me as my due -- no more, and no less.

"I have now laid my mind before you, as you told me, without
reserve. You know why I want to find this man, and what I mean to
do when I find him. I leave it to your sympathy for me to answer
the serious question that remains: How is the discovery to be
made? If a first trace of them can be found, after their
departure from Aldborough, I believe careful inquiry will suffice
for the rest. The personal appearance of the wife, and the
extraordinary contrast between her husband and herself, are
certain to be remarked, and remembered, by every stranger who
sees them.

"When you favor me with your answer, please address it to 'Care
of Admiral Bartram, St. Crux-in the-Marsh, near Ossory, Essex'.
Your much obliged

VIRGINIE LECOUNT."

VI.

_From Mr. de Bleriot to Mrs. Lecount._

"Dark's Buildings, Kingsland,

"October 25th, 1847.

"Private and Confidential.

"DEAR MADAM -- I hasten to reply to your favor of Saturday's
date. Circumstances have enabled me to forward your interests, by
consulting a friend of mine possessing great experience in the
management of private inquiries of all sorts. I have placed your
case before him (without mentioning names); and I am happy to
inform you that my views and his views of the proper course to
take agree in every particular.

"Both myself and friend, then, are of opinion that little or
nothing can be done toward tracing the parties you mention, until
the place of their temporary residence after they left Aldborough
has been discovered first. If this can be done, the sooner it is
done the better. Judging from your letter, some weeks must have
passed since the lawyer received his information that they had
shifted their quarters. As they are both remarkable-looking
people, the strangers who may have assisted them on their travels
have probably not forgotten them yet. Nevertheless, expedition is
desirable.

"The question for you to consider is, whether they may not
possibly have communicated the address of which we stand in need
to some other person besides the lawyer. The husband may have
written to members of his family, or the wife may have written to
members of her family. Both myself and friend are of opinion that
the latter chance is the likelier of the two. If you have any
means of access in the direction of the wife's family, we
strongly recommend you to make use of them. If not, please supply
us with the names of any of her near relations or intimate female
friends whom you know, and we will endeavor to get access for
you.

"In any case, we request you will at once favor us with the most
exact personal description that can be written of both the
parties. We may require your assistance, in this important
particular, at five minutes' notice. Favor us, therefore, with
the description by return of post. In the meantime, we will
endeavor to ascertain on our side whether any information is to
be privately obtained at Mr. Loscombe's office. The lawyer
himself is probably altogether beyond our reach. But if any one
of his clerks can be advantageously treated with on such terms as
may not overtax your pecuniary resources, accept my assurance
that the opportunity shall be made the most of by, dear madam,
your faithful servant,

ALFRED DE BLERIOT."

VII.

_From Mr. Pendril to Norah Vanstone._

"Serle Street, October 27th. 1847.

"MY DEAR MISS VANSTONE -- A lady named Lecount (formerly attached
to Mr. Noel Vanstone's service in the capacity of housekeeper)
has called at my office this morning, and has asked me to furnish
her with your address. I have begged her to excuse my immediate
compliance with her request, and to favor me with a call
to-morrow morning, when I shall be prepared to meet her with a
definite answer.

"My hesitation in this matter does not proceed from any distrust
of Mrs. Lecount personally, for I know nothing whatever to her
prejudice. But in making her request to me, she stated that the
object of the desired interview was to speak to you privately on
the subject of your sister. Forgive me for acknowledging that I
determined to withhold the address as soon as I heard this. You
will make allowances for your old friend, and your sincere
well-wisher? You will not take it amiss if I express my strong
disapproval of your allowing yourself, on any pretense whatever,
to be mixed up for the future with your sister's proceedings.

"I will not distress you by saying more than this. But I feel too
deep an interest in your welfare, and too sincere an admiration
of the patience with which you have borne all your trials, to say
less.

"If I cannot prevail on you to follow my advice, you have only to
say so, and Mrs. Lecount shall have your address to-morrow. In
this case (which I cannot contemplate without the greatest
unwillingness), let me at least recommend you to stipulate that
Miss Garth shall be present at the interview. In any matter with
which your sister is concerned, you may want an old friend's
advice, and an old friend's protection against your own generous
impulses. If I could have helped you in this way, I would; but
Mrs. Lecount gave me indirectly to understand that the subject to
be discussed was of too delicate a nature to permit of my
presence. Whatever this objection may be really worth, it cannot
apply to Miss Garth, who has brought you both up from childhood.
I say, again, therefore, if you see Mrs. Lecount, see her in Miss
Garth's company.

Always most truly yours,

"WILLIAM PENDRIL."

VIII.

_From Norah Vanstone to Mr. Pendril._

"Portland Place, Wednesday.

"DEAR MR. PENDRIL -- Pray don't think I am ungrateful for your
kindness. Indeed, indeed I am not! But I must see Mrs. Lecount.
You were not aware when you wrote to me that I had received a few
lines from Magdalen -- not telling me where she is, but holding
out the hope of our meeting before long. Perhaps Mrs. Lecount may
have something to say to me on this very subject. Even if it
should not be so, my sister -- do what she may -- is still my
sister. I can't desert her; I can't turn my back on any one who
comes to me in her name. You know, dear Mr. Pendril, I have
always been obstinate on this subject, and you have always borne
with me. Let me owe another obligation to you which I can never
return, and bear with me still!

"Need I say that I willingly accept that part of your advice
which refers to Miss Garth? I have already written to beg that
she will come here at four to-morrow afternoon. When you see Mrs.
Lecount, please inform her that Miss Garth will be with me, and
that she will find us both ready to receive her here to-morrow at
four o'clock. Gratefully yours,

"NORAH VANSTONE."

IX.

_From Mr. de Bleriot to Mrs. Lecount._

"Private.

"Dark's Buildings, October 28th.

"DEAR MADAM -- One of Mr. Loscombe's clerks has proved amenable
to a small pecuniary consideration, and has mentioned a
circumstance which it may be of some importance to you to know.

"Nearly a month since, accident gave the clerk in question an
opportunity of looking into one of the documents on his master's
table, which had attracted his attention from a slight peculiar
ity in the  form and color of the paper. He had only time, during
Mr. Loscombe's momentary absence, to satisfy his curiosity by
looking at the beginning of the document and at the end. At the
beginning he saw the customary form used in making a will; at the
end he discovered the signature of Mr. Noel Vanstone, with the
names of two attesting witnesses, and the date (of which he is
quite certain) -- _the thirtieth of September last._

"Before the clerk had time to make any further investigations,
his master returned, sorted the papers on the table, and
carefully locked up the will in the strong box devoted to the
custody of Mr. Noel Vanstone's documents. It has been ascertained
that, at the close of September, Mr. Loscombe was absent from the
office. If he was then employed in superintending the execution
of his client's will -- which is quite possible -- it follows
clearly that he was in the secret of Mr. Vanstone's address after
the removal of the 4th of September; and if you can do nothing on
your side, it may be desirable to have the lawyer watched on
ours. In any case, it is certainly ascertained that Mr. Noel
Vanstone has made his will since his marriage. I leave you to
draw your own conclusions from that fact, and remain, in the hope
of hearing from you shortly,

"Your faithful servant,

"ALFRED DE BLERIOT."

X.

_From Miss Garth to Mr. Pendril._

"Portland Place, October 28th.

"MY DEAR SIR -- Mrs. Lecount has just left us. If it was not too
late to wish, I should wish, from the bottom of my heart, that
Norah had taken your advice, and had refused to see her.

"I write in such distress of mind that I cannot hope to give you
a clear and complete account of the interview. I can only tell
you briefly what Mrs. Lecount has done, and what our situation
now is. The rest must be left until I am more composed, and until
I can speak to you personally.

"You will remember my informing you of the letter which Mrs.
Lecount addressed to Norah from Aldborough, and which I answered
for her in her absence. When Mrs. Lecount made her appearance
to-day, her first words announced to us that she had come to
renew the subject. As well as I can remember it, this is what she
said, addressing herself to Norah:

"'I wrote to you on the subject of your sister, Miss Vanstone,
some little time since, and Miss Garth was so good as to answer
the letter. What I feared at that time has come true. Your sister
has defied all my efforts to check her; she has disappeared in
company with my master, Mr. Noel Vanstone; and she is now in a
position of danger which may lead to her disgrace and ruin at a
moment's notice. It is my interest to recover my master, it is
your interest to save your sister. Tell me -- for time is
precious -- have you any news of her?'

"Norah answered, as well as her terror and distress would allow
her, 'I have had a letter, but there was no address on it.'

"Mrs. Lecount asked, 'Was there no postmark on the envelope?'

"Norah said, 'Yes; Allonby.'

"'Allonby is better than nothing,' said Mrs. Lecount. 'Allonby
may help you to trace her. Where is Allonby?'

"Norah told her. It all passed in a minute. I had been too much
confused and startled to interfere before, but I composed myself
sufficiently to interfere now.

"'You have entered into no particulars,' I said. 'You have only
frightened us -you have told us nothing.'

"'You shall hear the particulars, ma'am,' said Mrs. Lecount; 'and
you and Miss Vanstone shall judge for yourselves if I have
frightened you without a cause.'

"Upon this, she entered at once upon a long narrative, which I
cannot -- I might almost say, which I dare not -- repeat. You
will understand the horror we both felt when I tell you the end.
If Mrs. Lecount's statement is to be relied on, Magdalen has
carried her mad resolution of recovering her father's fortune to
the last and most desperate extremity -- she has married Michael
Vanstone's son under a false name. Her husband is at this moment
still persuaded that her maiden name was Bygrave, and that she is
really the niece of a scoundrel who assisted her imposture, and
whom I recognize, by the description of him, to have been Captain
Wragge.

"I spare you Mrs. Lecount's cool avowal, when she rose to leave
us, of her own mercenary motives in wishing to discover her
master and to enlighten him. I spare you the hints she dropped of
Magdalen's purpose in contracting this infamous marriage. The one
aim and object of my letter is to implore you to assist me in
quieting Norah's anguish of mind. The shock she has received at
hearing this news of her sister is not the worst result of what
has happened. She has persuaded herself that the answers she
innocently gave, in her distress, to Mrs. Lecount's questions on
the subject of her letter -- the answers wrung from her under the
sudden pressure of confusion and alarm -- may be used to
Magdalen's prejudice by the woman who purposely startled her into
giving the information. I can only prevent her from taking some
desperate step on her side -- some step by which she may forfeit
the friendship and protection of the excellent people with whom
she is now living -- by reminding her that if Mrs. Lecount traces
her master by means of the postmark on the letter, we may trace
Magdalen at the same time, and by the same means. Whatever
objection you may personally feel to renewing the efforts for the
rescue of this miserable girl which failed so lamentably at York,
I entreat you, for Norah's sake, to take the same steps now which
we took then. Send me the only assurance which will quiet her --
the assurance, under your own hand, that the search on our side
has begun. If you will do this, you may trust me, when the time
comes, to stand between these two sisters, and to defend Norah's
peace, character, and future prosperity at any price.

"Most sincerely yours,

"HARRIET GARTH."

XI.

_From Mrs. Lecount to Mr. de Bleriot._

"October 28th.

"DEAR SIR -- I have found the trace you wanted. Mrs. Noel
Vanstone has written to her sister. The letter contains no
address, but the postmark is Allonby, in Cumberland. From
Allonby, therefore, the inquiries must begin. You have already in
your possession the personal description of both husband and
wife. I urgently recommend you not to lose one unnecessary
moment. If it is possible to send to Cumberland immediately on
receipt of this letter, I beg you will do so.

"I have another word to say before I close my note -- a word
about the discovery in Mr. Loscombe's office.

"It is no surprise to me to hear that Mr. Noel Vanstone has made
his will since his marriage, and I am at no loss to guess in
whose favor the will is made. If I succeed in finding my master,
let that person get the money if that person can. A course to
follow in this matter has presented itself to my mind since I
received your letter, but my ignorance of details of business and
intricacies of law leaves me still uncertain whether my idea is
capable of ready and certain execution. I know no professional
person whom I can trust in this delicate and dangerous business.
Is your large experience in other matters large enough to help me
in this? I will call at your office to-morrow at two o'clock, for
the purpose of consulting you on the subject. It is of the
greatest importance, when I next see Mr. Noel Vanstone, that he
should find me thoroughly prepared beforehand in this matter of
the will. Your much obliged servant,

"VIRGINIE LECOUNT."

XII.

_From Mr. Pendril to Miss Garth._

"Serle Street, October 29th.

"DEAR MISS GARTH -- I have only a moment to assure you of the
sorrow with which I have read your letter. The circumstances
under which you urge your request, and the reasons you give for
making it, are sufficient to silence any objection I might
otherwise feel to the course you propose. A trustworthy person,
whom I have myself instructed, will start for Allonby to-day, and
as soon as I receive any news from him, you shall hear of it by
special messenger. Tell Miss Vanstone this, and pray add the
sincere expression of my sympathy and regard.

"Faithfully yours,

WILLIAM PENDRIL."

XIII.

_From Mr. de Bleriot to Mrs. Lecount._

"Dark's Bui ldings. November 1st.

"DEAR MADAM -- I have the pleasure of informing you that the
discovery has been made with far less trouble than I had
anticipated.

"Mr. and Mrs. Noel Vanstone have been traced across the Solway
Firth to Dumfries, and thence to a cottage a few miles from the
town, on the banks of the Nith. The exact address is Baliol
Cottage, near Dumfries.

"This information, though easily hunted up, has nevertheless been
obtained under rather singular circumstances.

"Before leaving Allonby, the persons in my employ discovered, to
their surprise, that a stranger was in the place pursuing the
same inquiry as themselves. In the absence of any instructions
preparing them for such an occurrence as this, they took their
own view of the circumstance. Considering the man as an intruder
on their business, whose success might deprive them of the credit
and reward of making the discovery, they took advantage of their
superiority in numbers, and of their being first in the field,
and carefully misled the stranger before they ventured any
further with their own investigations. I am in possession of the
details of their proceedings, with which I need not trouble you.
The end is, that this person, whoever he may be, was cleverly
turned back southward on a false scent before the men in my
employment crossed the Firth.

"I mention the circumstance, as you may be better able than I am
to find a clew to it, and as it may possibly be of a nature to
induce you to hasten your journey.

"Your faithful servant,

"ALFRED DE BLERIOT."

XIV.

_From Mrs. Lecount to Mr. de Bleriot._

"November 1st.

"DEAR SIR -- One line to say that your letter has just reached me
at my lodging in London. I think I know who sent the strange man
to inquire at Allonby. It matters little. Before he finds out his
mistake, I shall be at Dumfries. My luggage is packed, and I
start for the North by the next train.

"Your deeply obliged

"VIRGINIE LECOUNT."

THE FIFTH SCENE

BALIOL COTTAGE, DUMFRIES.

CHAPTER I.

TOWARD eleven o'clock, on the morning of the third of November,
the breakfast-table at Baliol Cottage presented that essentially
comfortless appearance which is caused by a meal in a state of
transition -- that is to say, by a meal prepared for two persons,
which has been already eaten by one, and which has not yet been
approached by the other. It must be a hardy appetite which can
contemplate without a momentary discouragement the battered
egg-shell, the fish half stripped to a skeleton, the crumbs in
the plate, and the dregs in the cup. There is surely a wise
submission to those weaknesses in human nature which must be
respected and not reproved, in the sympathizing rapidity with
which servants in places of public refreshment clear away all
signs of the customer in the past, from the eyes of the customer
in the present. Although his predecessor may have been the wife
of his bosom or the child of his loins, no man can find himself
confronted at table by the traces of a vanished eater, without a
passing sense of injury in connection with the idea of his own
meal.

Some such impression as this found its way into the mind of Mr.
Noel Vanstone when he entered the lonely breakfast-parlor at
Baliol Cottage shortly after eleven o'clock. He looked at the
table with a frown, and rang the bell with an expression of
disgust.

"Clear away this mess," he said, when the servant appeared. "Has
your mistress gone?"

"Yes, sir -- nearly an hour ago."

"Is Louisa downstairs?"

"Yes, sir."

"When you have put the table right, send Louisa up to me."

He walked away to the window. The momentary irritation passed
away from his face; but it left an expression there which
remained -- an expression of pining discontent. Personally, his
marriage had altered him for the worse. His wizen little cheeks
were beginning to shrink into hollows, his frail little figure
had already contracted a slight stoop. The former delicacy of his
complexion had gone -- the sickly paleness of it was all that
remained. His thin flaxen mustaches were no longer pragmatically
waxed and twisted into a curl: their weak feathery ends hung
meekly pendent over the querulous corners of his mouth. If the
ten or twelve weeks since his marriage had been counted by his
locks, they might have reckoned as ten or twelve years. He stood
at the window mechanically picking leaves from a pot of heath
placed in front of it, and drearily humming the forlorn fragment
of a tune.

The prospect from the window overlooked the course of the Nith at
a bend of the river a few miles above Dumfries. Here and there,
through wintry gaps in the wooded bank, broad tracts of the level
cultivated valley met the eye. Boats passed on the river, and
carts plodded along the high-road on their way to Dumfries. The
sky was clear; the November sun shone as pleasantly as if the
year had been younger by two good months; and the view, noted in
Scotland for its bright and peaceful charm, was presented at the
best which its wintry aspect could assume. If it had been hidden
in mist or drenched with rain, Mr. Noel Vanstone would, to all
appearance, have found it as attractive as he found it now. He
waited at the window until he heard Louisa's knock at the door,
then turned back sullenly to the breakfast-table and told her to
come in.

"Make the tea," he said. "I know nothing about it. I'm left here
neglected. Nobody helps me."

The discreet Louisa silently and submissively obeyed.

"Did your mistress leave any message for me," he asked, "before
she went away?"

"No message in particular, sir. My mistress only said she should
be too late if she waited breakfast any longer."

"Did she say nothing else?"

"She told me at the carriage door, sir, that she would most
likely be back in a week."

"Was she in good spirits at the carriage door?"

"No, sir. I thought my mistress seemed very anxious and uneasy.
Is there anything more I can do, sir?"

"I don't know. Wait a minute."

He proceeded discontentedly with his breakfast. Louisa waited
resignedly at the door.

"I think your mistress has been in bad spirits lately," he
resumed, with a sudden outbreak of petulance.

"My mistress has not been very cheerful, sir."

"What do you mean by not very cheerful? Do you mean to
prevaricate? Am I nobody in the house? Am I to be kept in the
dark about everything? Is your mistress to go away on her own
affairs, and leave me at home like a child -- and am I not even
to ask a question about her? Am I to be prevaricated with by a
servant? I won't be prevaricated with! Not very cheerful? What do
you mean by not very cheerful?"

"I only meant that my mistress was not in good spirits, sir."

"Why couldn't you say it, then? Don't you know the value of
words? The most dreadful consequences sometimes happen from not
knowing the value of words. Did your mistress tell you she was
going to London?"

"Yes, sir."

"What did you think when your mistress told you she was going to
London? Did you think it odd she was going without me?"

"I did not presume to think it odd, sir. -- Is there anything
more I can do for you, if you please, sir?"

"What sort of a morning is it out? Is it warm? Is the sun on the
garden?"

"Yes, sir."

"Have you seen the sun yourself on the garden?"

"Yes, sir."

"Get me my great-coat; I'll take a little turn. Has the man
brushed it? Did you see the man brush it yourself? What do you
mean by saying he has brushed it, when you didn't see him? Let me
look at the tails. If there's a speck of dust on the tails, I'll
turn the man off! -- Help me on with it."

Louisa helped him on with his coat, and gave him his hat. He went
out irritably. The coat was a large one (it had belonged to his
father); the hat was a large one (it was a misfit purchased as a
bargain by himself). He was submerged in his hat and coat; he
looked singularly small, and frail, and miserable, as he slowly
wended his way, in the wintry sunlight, down the garden walk. The
path sloped gently from the back of the house to the water side,
from which it was parted by a low wooden fence. After pacing
backward and forward slowly for some little time, he stopped at
the lower extremity of the garden, and, leaning on the fen ce,
looked  down listlessly at the smooth flow of the river.

His thoughts still ran on the subject of his first fretful
question to Louisa -he was still brooding over the circumstances
under which his wife had left the cottage that morning, and over
the want of consideration toward himself implied in the manner of
her departure. The longer he thought of his grievance, the more
acutely he resented it. He was capable of great tenderness of
feeling where any injury to his sense of his own importance was
concerned. His head drooped little by little on his arms, as they
rested on the fence, and, in the deep sincerity of his
mortification, he sighed bitterly.

The sigh was answered by a voice close at his side.

"You were happier with _me_, sir," said the voice, in accents of
tender regret.

He looked up with a scream -- literally, with a scream -- and
confronted Mrs. Lecount.

Was it the specter of the woman, or the woman herself? Her hair
was white; her face had fallen away; her eyes looked out large,
bright, and haggard over her hollow cheeks. She was withered and
old. Her dress hung loose round her wasted figure; not a trace of
its buxom autumnal beauty remained. The quietly impenetrable
resolution, the smoothly insinuating voice -- these were the only
relics of the past which sickness and suffering had left in Mrs.
Lecount.

"Compose yourself, Mr. Noel," she said, gently. "You have no
cause to be alarmed at seeing me. Your servant, when I inquired,
said you were in the garden, and I came here to find you. I have
traced you out, sir, with no resentment against yourself, with no
wish to distress you by so much as the shadow of a reproach. I
come here on what has been, and is still, the business of my life
-- your service.

He recovered himself a little, but he was still incapable of
speech. He held fast by the fence, and stared at her.

"Try to possess your mind, sir, of what I say," proceeded Mrs.
Lecount. "I have come here not as your enemy, but as your friend.
I have been tried by sickness, I have been tried by distress.
Nothing remains of me but my heart. My heart forgives you; my
heart, in your sore need -- need which you have yet to feel
-places me at your service. Take my arm, Mr. Noel. A little turn
in the sun will help you to recover yourself."

She put his hand through her arm and marched him slowly up the
garden walk. Before she had been five minutes in his company, she
had resumed full possession of him in her own right

"Now down again, Mr. Noel," she said. "Gently down again, in this
fine sunlight. I have much to say to you, sir, which you never
expected to hear from me. Let me ask a little domestic question
first. They told me at the house door Mrs. Noel Vanstone was gone
away on a journey. Has she gone for long?"

Her master's hand trembled on her arm as she put that question.
Instead of answering it, he tried faintly to plead for himself.
The first words that escaped him were prompted by his first
returning sense -- the sense that his housekeeper had taken him
into custody. He tried to make his peace with Mrs. Lecount.

"I always meant to do something for you," he said, coaxingly.
"You would have heard from me before long. Upon my word and
honor, Lecount, you would have heard from me before long!"

"I don't doubt it, sir," replied Mrs. Lecount. "But for the
present, never mind about Me. You and your interests first."

"How did you come here?" he asked, looking at her in
astonishment. "How came you to find me out?"

"It is a long story, sir; I will tell it you some other time. Let
it be enough to say now that I _have_ found you. Will Mrs. Noel
be back again at the house to-day? A little louder, sir; I can
hardly hear you. So! so! Not back again for a week! And where has
she gone? To London, did you say? And what for? -- I am not
inquisitive, Mr. Noel; I am asking serious questions, under
serious necessity. Why has your wife left you here, and gone to
London by herself?"

They were down at the fence again as she made that last inquiry,
and they waited, leaning against it, while Noel Vanstone
answered. Her reiterated assurances that she bore him no malice
were producing their effect; he was beginning to recover himself.
The old helpless habit of addressing all his complaints to his
housekeeper was returning already with the re-appearance of Mrs.
Lecount -- returning insidiously, in company with that besetting
anxiety to talk about his grievances, which had got the better of
him at the breakfast-table, and which had shown the wound
inflicted on his vanity to his wife's maid.

"I can't answer for Mrs. Noel Vanstone," he said, spitefully.
"Mrs. Noel Vanstone has not treated me with the consideration
which is my due. She has taken my permission for granted, and she
has only thought proper to tell me that the object of her journey
is to see her friends in London. She went away this morning
without bidding me good-by. She takes her own way as if I was
nobody; she treats me like a child. You may not believe it,
Lecount, but I don't even know who her friends are. I am left
quite in the dark; I am left to guess for myself that her friends
in London are her uncle and aunt."

Mrs. Lecount privately considered the question by the help of her
own knowledge obtained in London. She soon reached the obvious
conclusion. After writing to her sister in the first instance,
Magdalen had now, in all probability, followed the letter in
person. There was little doubt that the friends she had gone to
visit in London were her sister and Miss Garth.

"Not her uncle and aunt, sir," resumed Mrs. Lecount, composedly.
"A secret for your private ear! She has no uncle and aunt.
Another little turn before I explain myself -- another little
turn to compose your spirits."

She took him into custody once more, and marched him back toward
the house.

"Mr. Noel!" she said, suddenly stopping in the middle of the
walk. "Do you know what was the worst mischief you ever did
yourself in your life? I will tell you. That worst mischief was
sending me to Zurich."

His hand began to tremble on her arm once more.

"I didn't do it!" he cried piteously. "It was all Mr. Bygrave."

"You acknowledge, sir, that Mr. Bygrave deceived _me?_" proceeded
Mrs. Lecount. "I am glad to hear that. You will be all the
readier to make the next discovery which is waiting for you --
the discovery that Mr. Bygrave has deceived _you_. He is not here
to slip through my fingers now, and I am not the helpless woman
in this place that I was at Aldborough. Thank God!"

She uttered that devout exclamation through her set teeth. All
her hatred of Captain Wragge hissed out of her lips in those two
words.

"Oblige me, sir, by holding one side of my traveling-bag," she
resumed, "while I open it and take something out."

The interior of the bag disclosed a series of neatly-folded
papers, all laid together in order, and numbered outside. Mrs.
Lecount took out one of the papers, and shut up the bag again
with a loud snap of the spring that closed it.

"At Aldborough, Mr. Noel, I had only my own opinion to support
me," she remarked. "My own opinion was nothing against Miss
Bygrave's youth and beauty, and Mr. Bygrave's ready wit. I could
only hope to attack your infatuation with proofs, and at that
time I had not got them. I have got them now! I am armed at all
points with proofs; I bristle from head to foot with proofs; I
break my forced silence, and speak with the emphasis of my
proofs. Do you know this writing, sir?"

He shrank back from the paper which she offered to him.

"I don't understand this," he said, nervously. "I don't know what
you want, or what you mean."

Mrs. Lecount forced the paper into his hand. "You shall know what
I mean, sir, if you will give me a moment's attention," she said.
"On the day after you went away to St. Crux, I obtained admission
to Mr. Bygrave's house, and I had some talk in private with Mr.
Bygrave's wife. That talk supplied me with the means to convince
you which I had wanted to find for weeks and weeks past. I wrote
you a letter to say so -- I wrote to tell you that I would
forfeit  my place in your service, and my expectations from your
generosity, if I did not prove to you when I  came back from
Switzerland that my own private suspicion of Miss Bygrave was the
truth. I d irected that letter to you at St. Crux, and I posted
it myself. Now, Mr. Noel, read the paper which I have forced into
your hand. It is Admiral Bartram's written affirmation that my
letter came to St. Crux, and that he inclosed it to you, under
cover to Mr. Bygrave, at your own request. Did Mr. Bygrave ever
give you that letter? Don't agitate yourself, sir! One word of
reply will do -- Yes or No."

He read the paper, and looked up at her with growing bewilderment
and fear. She obstinately waited until he spoke. "No," he said,
faintly; "I never got the letter."

"First proof!" said Mrs. Lecount, taking the paper from him, and
putting it back in the bag. "One more, with your kind permission,
before we come to things more serious still. I gave you a written
description, sir, at Aldborough, of a person not named, and I
asked you to compare it with Miss Bygrave the next time you were
in her company. After having first shown the description to Mr.
Bygrave -it is useless to deny it now, Mr. Noel; your friend at
North Shingles is not here to help you! -- after having first
shown my note to Mr. Bygrave, you made the comparison, and you
found it fail in the most important particular. There were two
little moles placed close together on the left side of the neck,
in my description of the unknown lady, and there were no little
moles at all when you looked at Miss Bygrave's neck. I am old
enough to be your mother, Mr. Noel. If the question is not
indelicate, may I ask what the present state of your knowledge is
on the subject of your wife's neck?"