at held
the letter dropped heavily into her lap; she became pale, and old, and
haggard in a moment. Thoughts, far removed from her present aims and
interests; remembrances that carried her back to other lands than
England, to other times than the time of her life in service, prolonged
their inner shadows to the surface, and showed the traces of their
mysterious passage darkly on her face. The minutes followed each other,
and still the servant below stairs waited vainly for the parlor bell.
The minutes followed each other, and still she sat, tearless and quiet,
dead to the present and the future, living in the past.

The entrance of the servant, uncalled, roused her. With a heavy sigh,
the cold and secret woman folded the letter up again and addressed
herself to the interests and the duties of the passing time.

She decided the question of going or not going to Zurich, after a
very brief consideration of it. Before she had drawn her chair to the
breakfast-table she had resolved to go.

Admirably as Captain Wragge's stratagem had worked, it might have
failed--unassisted by the occurrence of the morning--to achieve this
result. The very accident against which it had been the captain's chief
anxiety to guard--the accident which had just taken place in spite of
him--was, of all the events that could have happened, the one event
which falsified every previous calculation, by directly forwarding the
main purpose of the conspiracy! If Mrs. Lecount had not obtained the
information of which she was in search before the receipt of the letter
from Zurich, the letter might have addressed her in vain. She would have
hesitated before deciding to leave England, and that hesitation might
have proved fatal to the captain's scheme.

As it was, with the plain proofs in her possession, with the gown
discovered in Magdalen's wardrobe, with the piece cut out of it in her
own pocketbook, and with the knowledge, obtained from Mrs. Wragge, of
the very house in which the disguise had been put on, Mrs. Lecount had
now at her command the means of warning Noel Vanstone as she had never
been able to warn him yet, or, in other words, the means of guarding
against any dangerous tendencies toward reconciliation with the Bygraves
which might otherwise have entered his mind during her absence at
Zurich. The only difficulty which now perplexed her was the difficulty
of deciding whether she should communicate with her master personally or
by writing, be