you can have heard anything to my disadvantage?'
'Quite possible,' said Magdalen, without a moment's flinching from the answer.
'May I inquire the particulars?' asked the captain, with the politest composure. 'Don't spare my feelings; oblige me by speaking out. In the plainest terms, now, what have you heard?'
She answered him with a woman's desperate disregard of consequences when she is driven to bay—she answered him instantly,
'I have heard you are a Rogue.'
'Have you, indeed?' said the impenetrable Wragge. 'A Rogue? Well, I waive my privilege of setting you right on that point for a fitter time. For the sake of argument, let us say I am a Rogue. What is Mr. Huxtable?'
'A respectable man, or I should not have seen him in the house where we first met.'
'Very good. Now observe! You talked of writing to Mr. Huxtable a minute ago. What do you think a respectable man is likely to do with a young lady who openly acknowledges that she has run away from her home and her friends to go on the stage? My dear girl, on your own showing, it's not a respectable man you want in your present predicament. It's a Rogue—like me.'
Magdalen laughed, bitterly.
'There is some truth in that,' she said. 'Thank you for recalling me to myself and my circumstances. I have my end to gain—and who am I, to pick and choose the way of getting to it? It is my turn to beg pardon now. I have been talking as if I was a young lady of family and position. Absurd! We know better than that, don't we, Captain Wragge? You are quite right. Nobody's child must sleep under Somebody's roof—and why not yours?'
'This way,' said the captain, dexterously profiting by the sudden change in her humor, and cunningly refraining from exasperating it by saying more himself. 'This way.'
She followed him a few steps, and suddenly stopped.
'Suppose I
'Can you trust your courage with your sister?' whispered the captain, who had not forgotten the references to Norah which had twice escaped her already.
Her head drooped. She shivered as if the cold night air had struck her, and leaned back wearily against the parapet of the wall.
'Not with Norah,' she said, sadly. 'I could trust myself with the others. Not with Norah.'
'This way,' repeated Captain Wragge. She roused herself; looked up at the darkening heaven, looked round at the darkening view. 'What must be, must,' she said, and followed him.
The Minster clock struck the quarter to eight as they left the Walk on the Wall and descended the steps into Rosemary Lane. Almost at the same moment the lawyer's clerk from London gave the last instructions to his subordinates, and took up his own position, on the opposite side of the river, within easy view of Mr. Huxtable's door.
CHAPTER II.
CAPTAIN WRAGGE stopped nearly midway in the one little row of houses composing Rosemary Lane, and let himself and his guest in at the door of his lodgings with his own key. As they entered the passage, a care-worn woman in a widow's cap made her appearance with a candle. 'My niece,' said the captain, presenting Magdalen; 'my niece on a visit to York. She has kindly consented to occupy your empty bedroom. Consider it let, if you please, to my niece—and be very particular in airing the sheets? Is Mrs. Wragge upstairs? Very good. You may lend me your candle. My dear girl, Mrs. Wragge's boudoir is on the first floor; Mrs. Wragge is visible. Allow me to show you the way up.'
As he ascended the stairs first, the care-worn widow whispered, piteously, to Magdalen, 'I hope you'll pay me, miss. Your uncle doesn't.'
The captain threw open the door of the front room on the first floor, and disclosed a female figure, arrayed in a gown of tarnished amber-colored satin, seated solitary on a small chair, with dingy old gloves on its hands, with a tattered old book on its knees, and with one little bedroom candle by its side. The figure terminated at its upper extremity in a large, smooth, white round face—like a moon—encircled by a cap and green ribbons, and dimly irradiated by eyes of mild and faded blue, which looked straightforward into vacancy, and took not the smallest notice of Magdalen's appearance, on the opening of the door.
'Mrs. Wragge!' cried the captain, shouting at her as if she was fast asleep. 'Mrs. Wragge!'
The lady of the faded blue eyes slowly rose to an apparently interminable height. When she had at last attained an upright position, she towered to a stature of two or three inches over six feet. Giants of both sexes are, by a wise dispensation of Providence, created, for the most part, gentle. If Mrs. Wragge and a lamb had been placed side by side, comparison, under those circumstances, would have exposed the lamb as a rank impostor.
'Tea, captain?' inquired Mrs. Wragge, looking submissively down at her husband, whose head, when he stood on tiptoe, barely reached her shoulder.
'Miss Vanstone, the younger,' said the captain, presenting Magdalen. 'Our fair relative, whom I have met by fortunate accident. Our guest for the night. Our guest!' reiterated the captain, shouting once more as if the tall lady was still fast asleep, in spite of the plain testimony of her own eyes to the contrary.
A smile expressed itself (in faint outline) on the large vacant space of Mrs. Wragge's countenance. 'Oh?' she said, interrogatively. 'Oh, indeed? Please, miss, will you sit down? I'm sorry—no, I don't mean I'm sorry; I mean I'm glad—' she stopped, and consulted her husband by a helpless look.
'Glad, of course!' shouted the captain.
'Glad, of course,' echoed the giantess of the amber satin, more meekly than ever.
'Mrs. Wragge is not deaf,' explained the captain. 'She's only a little slow. Constitutionally torpid—if I may use
