nt friends will excuse you for the rest of the day."

Before Mrs. Lecount could throw an instant's doubt on the genuineness
of the neuralgic attack, her master's fidgety sympathy declared
itself exactly as the captain had anticipated, in the most active
manifestations. He stopped the carriage, and insisted on an immediate
change in the arrangement of the places--the comfortable back seat for
Miss Bygrave and her uncle, the front seat for Lecount and himself. Had
Lecount got her smelling-bottle? Excellent creature! let her give it
directly to Miss Bygrave, and let the coachman drive carefully. If the
coachman shook Miss Bygrave he should not have a half-penny for himself.
Mesmerism was frequently useful in these cases. Mr. Noel Vanstone's
father had been the most powerful mesmerist in Europe, and Mr. Noel
Vanstone was his father's son. Might he mesmerize? Might he order that
infernal coachman to draw up in a shady place adapted for the purpose?
Would medical help be preferred? Could medical help be found any
nearer than Aldborough? That ass of a coachman didn't know. Stop every
respectable man who passed in a gig, and ask him if he was a doctor! So
Mr. Noel Vanstone ran on, with brief intervals for breathing-time, in a
continually-ascending scale of sympathy and self-importance, throughout
the drive home.

Mrs. Lecount accepted her defeat without uttering a word. From the
moment when Captain Wragge interrupted her, her thin lips closed and
opened no more for the remainder of the journey. The warmest expressions
of her master's anxiety for the suffering young lady provoked from her
no outward manifestations of anger. She took as little notice of him
as possible. She paid no attention whatever to the captain, whose
exasperating consideration for his vanquished enemy made him more polite
to her than ever. The nearer and the nearer they got to Aldborough the
more and more fixedly Mrs. Lecount's hard black eyes looked at Magdalen
reclining on the opposite seat, with her eyes closed and her veil down.

It was only when the carriage stopped at North Shingles, and when
Captain Wragge was handing Magdalen out, that the housekeeper at last
condescended to notice him. As he smiled and took off his hat at the
carriage door, the strong restraint she had laid on herself suddenly
gave way, and she flashed one look at him which scorched up the
captain's politeness on the spot. He turned at once, with a hasty
acknowledgment of Noel Van