in the dark. In any event, she determined to
run the risk. Of the three chances in her favour,
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, on his return to the
house, 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
race 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
flavour 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 house-
keeper's brother possessed a modest competence;
that his sister was his nearest living relative;
and that there were certain 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