ct," pursued the captain. "It has
just occurred to my mind that you might actually have spoken in earnest.
My poor child! how can I earn the fifty pounds before the reward is
offered to me? Those handbills may not be publicly posted for a week to
come. Precious as you are to all your relatives (myself included), take
my word for it, the lawyers who are managing this case will not pay
fifty pounds for you if they can possibly help it. Are you still
persuaded that my needy pockets are gaping for the money? Very good.
Button them up in spite of me with your own fair fingers. There is a
train to London at nine forty-five to-night. Submit yourself to your
friend's wishes and go back by it."

"Never!" said Magdalen, firing at the bare suggestion, exactly as
the captain had intended she should. "If my mind had not been made up
before, that vile handbill would have decided me. I forgive Norah," she
added, turning away and speaking to herself, "but not Mr. Pendril, and
not Miss Garth."

"Quite right!" said Captain Wragge. "The family spirit. I should have
done the same myself at your age. It runs in the blood. Hark! there goes
the clock again--half-past seven. Miss Vanstone, pardon this seasonable
abruptness! If you are to carry out your resolution--if you are to
be your own mistress much longer, you must take a course of some kind
before eight o'clock. You are young, you are inexperienced, you are in
imminent danger. Here is a position of emergency on one side--and here
am I, on the other, with an uncle's interest in you, full of advice. Tap
me."

"Suppose I choose to depend on nobody, and to act for myself?" said
Magdalen. "What then?"

"Then," replied the captain, "you will walk straight into one of the
four traps which are set to catch you in the ancient and interesting
city of York. Trap the first, at Mr. Huxtable's house; trap the second,
at all the hotels; trap the third, at the railway station; trap the
fourth, at the theater. That man with the handbills has had an hour at
his disposal. If he has not set those four traps (with the assistance
of the local solicitor) by this time, he is not the competent lawyer's
clerk I take him for. Come, come, my dear girl! if there is somebody
else in the background, whose advice you prefer to mine--"

"You see that I am alone," she interposed, proudly. "If you knew me
better, you would know that I depend on nobody but myself."

Those words decided the only doubt which now remai