girl!"

He took her hand in silence, patted it for a moment, and then opened the
door for her to go back to her own room again. There was genuine regret
in his face as he showed her that trifling attention. He was a vagabond
and a cheat; he had lived a mean, shuffling, degraded life, but he was
human; and she had found her way to the lost sympathies in him which
not even the self-profanation of a swindler's existence could wholly
destroy. "Damn the breakfast!" he said, when the servant came in for her
orders. "Go to the inn directly, and say I want a carriage and pair at
the door in an hour's time." He went out into the passage, still chafing
under a sense of mental disturbance which was new to him, and shouted
to his wife more fiercely than ever--"Pack up what we want for a week's
absence, and be ready in half an hour!" Having issued those directions,
he returned to the breakfast-room, and looked at the half-spread table
with an impatient wonder at his disinclination to do justice to his own
meal. "She has rubbed off the edge of my appetite," he said to himself,
with a forced laugh. "I'll try a cigar, and a turn in the fresh air."

If he had been twenty years younger, those remedies might have failed
him. But where is the man to be found whose internal policy succumbs
to revolution when that man is on the wrong side of fifty? Exercise and
change of place gave the captain back into the possession of himself.
He recovered the lost sense of the flavor of his cigar, and recalled
his wandering attention to the question of his approaching absence
from Aldborough. A few minutes' consideration satisfied his mind that
Magdalen's outbreak had forced him to take the course of all others
which, on a fair review of existing emergencies, it was now most
desirable to adopt.

Captain Wragge's inquiries on the evening when he and Magdalen had
drunk tea at Sea View had certainly informed him that the housekeeper's
brother possessed a modest competence; that his sister was his nearest
living relative; and that there were some unscrupulous cousins on the
spot who were anxious to usurp the place in his will which properly
belonged to Mrs. Lecount. Here were strong motives to take the
housekeeper to Zurich when the false report of her brother's relapse
reached England. But if any idea of Noel Vanstone's true position dawned
on her in the meantime, who could say whether she might not, at the
eleventh hour, prefer asserting her large pecuni