y bright already with the new sunlight.
Distant voices of bargemen on the river, and the chirping of birds among
the weeds which topped the old city wall, were the only sounds that
broke the morning silence. She sat down by the window; and searched her
mind for the thoughts which she had lost, when weariness overcame her on
the night before.

The first subject to which she returned was the vagabond subject of
Captain Wragge.

The "moral agriculturist" had failed to remove her personal distrust of
him, cunningly as he had tried to plead against it by openly confessing
the impostures that he had practiced on others. He had raised her
opinion of his abilities; he had amused her by his humor; he had
astonished her by his assurance; but he had left her original conviction
that he was a Rogue exactly where it was when he first met with her.
If the one design then in her mind had been the design of going on the
stage, she would, at all hazards, have rejected the more than doubtful
assistance of Captain Wragge on the spot.

But the perilous journey on which she had now adventured herself had
another end in view--an end, dark and distant--an end, with pitfalls
hidden on the way to it, far other than the shallow pitfalls on the
way to the stage. In the mysterious stillness of the morning, her mind
looked on to its second and its deeper design, and the despicable figure
of the swindler rose before her in a new view.

She tried to shut him out--to feel above him and beyond him again, as
she had felt up to this time.

After a little trifling with her dress, she took from her bosom the
white silk bag which her own hands had made on the farewell night at
Combe-Raven. It drew together at the mouth with delicate silken strings.
The first thing she took out, on opening it, was a lock of Frank's hair,
tied with a morsel of silver thread; the next was a sheet of paper
containing the extracts which she had copied from her father's will and
her father's letter; the last was a closely-folded packet of bank-notes,
to the value of nearly two hundred pounds--the produce (as Miss Garth
had rightly conjectured) of the sale of her jewelry and her dresses, in
which the servant at the boarding-school had privately assisted her. She
put back the notes at once, without a second glance at them, and then
sat looking thoughtfully at the lock of hair as it lay on her lap.
"You are better than nothing," she said, speaking to it with a girl's
fanciful