"Just so. And the means of coming at that
right, which were hard with the father who
was not a miser are easy with the son, who
is?"

"Perfectly easy."

"Write me down an Ass, for the first time in
my life!" cried the captain, at the end of his
patience. "Hang me if I know what you
mean!"

She looked round at him, for the first time—
looked him straight and steadily in the face.

"I will tell you what I mean," she said. "I
mean to marry him."

Captain Wragge started up on his knees; and
stopped on them, petrified by astonishment.

"Remember what I told you," said Magdalen,
looking away from him again. "I have lost all
care for myself. I have only one end in life
now; and the sooner I reach it— and die— the
better. If— " She stopped; altered her
position a little; and pointed with one hand to the
fast-ebbing stream beneath her, gleaming dim
in the darkening twilight— "if I had been what
I once was, I would have thrown myself into
that river, sooner than do what I am going to do
now. As it is, I trouble myself no longer; I
weary my mind with no more schemes. The
short way, and the vile way, lies before me. I
take it, Captain Wragge— and marry him."

"Keeping him in total ignorance of who you
are?" said the captain, slowly rising to his
feet, and slowly moving round, so as to see her
face. "Marrying him, as my niece— Miss
Bygrave?"

"As your niece, Miss Bygrave."

"And after the marriage—?" His voice
faltered, as he began the question, and he left it
unfinished.

"After the marriage," she said, "I shall stand
in no further need of your assistance."

The captain stooped, as she gave him that
answer— looked close at her— and suddenly drew
back, without uttering a word. He walked
away some paces, and sat down again doggedly
on the grass. If Magdalen could have seen his
face, in the dying light, his face would have
startled her. For the first time, probably, since
his boyhood, Captain Wragge had changed colour.
He was deadly pale.

"Have you nothing to say to me?" she asked.
"Perhaps you are waiting to hear what terms I
have to offer? These are my terms. I pay all
our expenses here; and when we part, on the day
of the marriage, you take a farewell gift away
with you of two hundred pounds. Do you
promise me your assistance on those conditions?"

"What am I expected to do?" he asked, with
a furtive look at her, and a sudden distrust in his
voice.

"You are expected to preserve my assumed
character and your own," she answered; "and
you are to prevent any inquiries of Mrs.
Lecount's from discovering who I really am. I
ask no more. The rest is my responsibility— not
yours."

"I have nothing to do with what happens—
at any time, or in any place— after the
marriage?"

"Nothing whatever."

"I may leave you at the church door, if I
please?"

"At the church door— with your fee in
your pocket."

"Paid from the money in your own
possession?"

"Certainly! How else should I pay it?"

Captain Wragge took off his hat, and passed
his handkerchief over his face with an air of
relief.

"Give me a minute to consider it," he said.

"As many minutes as you like," she rejoined,
reclining on the bank in her former position, and
returning to her former occupation of tearing up
the tufts of grass and flinging them out into the
air.

The captain's reflections were not complicated
by any unnecessary divergences, from the
contemplation of his own position to the
contemplation of Magdalen's. Utterly incapable of
appreciating the injury done her by Frank's infamous
treachery to his engagement— an injury which
had severed her, at one cruel blow, from the
aspiration which, delusion though it was, had
been the saving aspiration of her life— Captain
Wragge accepted the simple fact of her despair,
just as he found it; and then looked straight to
the consequences of the proposal which she had
made to him.

In the prospect before the marriage he saw
nothing more serious involved than the
practice of a deception, in no important degree
different— except in the end to be attained
by it— from the deceptions which his
vagabond life had long since accustomed him to
contemplate and to carry out. In the prospect
after the marriage, he dimly discerned, through
the ominous darkness of the future, the lurking
phantoms of Terror and Crime, and the black
gulphs behind them of Ruin and Death. A
man of boundless audacity and resource, within
his own mean limits; beyond those limits, the
captain was as deferentially submissive to the
majesty of the law as the most harmless man in
existence; as cautious in looking after his own
personal safety, as the veriest coward that ever
walked the earth. But one serious question now
filled his mind. Could he, on the terms proposed
to him, join the conspiracy against Noel
Vanstone up to the point of the marriage— and
then withdraw from it, without risk of involving
himself in the consequences which his experience
told him must certainly ensue.

Strange as it may seem, his decision, in this
emergency, was mainly influenced by no less
a person than Mr. Noel Vanstone himself. The
captain might have resisted the money-offer
which Magdalen had made to him— for the
profits of the Entertainment had filled his pockets
with more than three times two hundred pounds.