of
which he had robbed my sister and myself. To the last farthing, Captain
Wragge, as certainly as you sit there, to the last farthing! A
bold conspiracy, a shocking deception--wasn't it? I don't care! Any
conspiracy, any deception, is justified to my conscience by the vile law
which has left us helpless. You talked of my reserve just now. Have I
dropped it at last? Have I spoken out at the eleventh hour?"

The captain laid his hand solemnly on his heart, and launched himself
once more on his broadest flow of language.

"You fill me with unavailing regret," he said. "If that old man
had lived, what a crop I might have reaped from him! What enormous
transactions in moral agriculture it might have been my privilege to
carry on! _Ars longa,_" said Captain Wragge, pathetically drifting into
Latin--"_vita brevis!_ Let us drop a tear on the lost opportunities of
the past, and try what the present can do to console us. One conclusion
is clear to my mind--the experiment you proposed to try with Mr.
Michael Vanstone is totally hopeless, my dear girl, in the case of his
son. His son is impervious to all common forms of pecuniary temptation.
You may trust my solemn assurance," continued the captain, speaking
with an indignant recollection of the answer to his advertisement in
the Times, "when I inform you that Mr. Noel Vanstone is emphatically the
meanest of mankind."

"I can trust my own experience as well," said Magdalen. "I have
seen him, and spoken to him--I know him better than you do. Another
disclosure, Captain Wragge, for your private ear! I sent you back
certain articles of costume when they had served the purpose for which I
took them to London. That purpose was to find my way to Noel Vanstone
in disguise, and to judge for myself of Mrs. Lecount and her master. I
gained my object; and I tell you again, I know the two people in that
house yonder whom we have now to deal with better than you do."

Captain Wragge expressed the profound astonishment, and asked the
innocent questions appropriate to the mental condition of a person taken
completely by surprise.

"Well," he resumed, when Magdalen had briefly answered him, "and what is
the result on your own mind? There must be a result, or we should not be
here. You see your way? Of course, my dear girl, you see your way?"

"Yes," she said, quickly. "I see my way."

The captain drew a little nearer to her, with eager curiosity expressed
in every line of his vagabond fac