d 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 gulfs 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 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. But the prospect of dealing a blow in
the dark at the man who had estimated his information and himself at
the value of a five pound note proved too much for his caution and his
self-control. On the small neutral ground of self-importance, the best
men and the worst meet on the same terms. Captain Wragge's indignation,
when he saw the answer to his advertisement, stooped to no retrospective
estimate of his own conduct; he was as deeply offended, as sincerely
angry as if he had made a perfectly honorable proposal, and had been
rewarded for it by a personal insult. He had been too full of his own
grievance to keep it out of his first letter to Magdalen. He had more or
less forgotten himself on every subsequent occasion when Noel Vanstone's
name was mentioned. And in now fin