als one of her hands raised itself in
the air, shook an imaginary frying-pan, and dropped again with a faint
thump on the cookery-book in her lap. At the sound of her husband's
voice, she started to her feet, and confronted him with her mind fast
asleep, and her eyes wide open.

"Assist Miss Vanstone," said the captain. "And the next time you forget
yourself in your chair, fall asleep straight--don't annoy me by falling
asleep crooked."

Mrs. Wragge opened her eyes a little wider, and looked at Magdalen in
helpless amazement.

"Is the captain breakfasting by candle-light?" she inquired, meekly.
"And haven't I done the omelette?"

Before her husband's corrective voice could apply a fresh stimulant,
Magdalen took her compassionately by the arm and led her out of the
room.

"Another object besides the object I know of?" repeated Captain Wragge,
when he was left by himself. "_Is_ there a gentleman in the background,
after all? Is there mischief brewing in the dark that I don't bargain
for?"

CHAPTER III.

TOWARD six o'clock the next morning, the light pouring in on her face
awoke Magdalen in the bedroom in Rosemary Lane.

She started from her deep, dreamless repose of the past night with that
painful sense of bewilderment, on first waking, which is familiar to all
sleepers in strange beds. "Norah!" she called out mechanically, when she
opened her eyes. The next instant her mind roused itself, and her senses
told her the truth. She looked round the miserable room with a loathing
recognition of it. The sordid contrast which the place presented to
all that she had been accustomed to see in her own bed-chamber--the
practical abandonment, implied in its scanty furniture, of those elegant
purities of personal habit to which she had been accustomed from her
childhood--shocked that sense of bodily self-respect in Magdalen which
is a refined woman's second nature. Contemptible as the influence
seemed, when compared with her situation at that moment, the bare
sight of the jug and basin in a corner of the room decided her first
resolution when she woke. She determined, then and there, to leave
Rosemary Lane.

How was she to leave it? With Captain Wragge, or without him?

She dressed herself, with a dainty shrinking from everything in the room
which her hands or her clothes touched in the process, and then opened
the window. The autumn air felt keen and sweet; and the little patch of
sky that she could see was warml