Heartrending Statements of the officer’s family, the curate’s wife, and the grazier’s widow, stained with tears, blotted with emotion; et cetera, et cetera.  Here, in Numbers Five and Six, are my own personal subscriptions to local charities, actually paid in remunerative neighborhoods, on the principle of throwing a sprat to catch a herring; also, my diary of each day’s proceedings, my personal reflections and remarks, my statement of existing difficulties (such as the difficulty of finding myself T. W. K. in this interesting city); my outgivings and incomings; wind and weather; politics and public events; fluctuations in my own health; fluctuations in Mrs. Wragge’s head; fluctuations in our means and meals, our payments, prospects, and principles; et cetera, et cetera.  So, my dear girl, the Swindler’s Mill goes.  So you see me exactly as I am.  You knew, before I met you, that I lived on my wits.  Well! have I, or have I not, shown you that I have wits to live on?”

“I have no doubt you have done yourself full justice,” said Magdalen, quietly.

“I am not at all exhausted,” continued the captain.  “I can go on, if necessary, for t he rest of the evening.—­However, if I have do ne myself full justice, perhaps I may leave the remaining points in my character to develop themselves at future opportunities.  For the present, I withdraw myself from notice.  Exit Wragge.  And now to business!  Permit me to inquire what effect I have produced on your own mind?  Do you still believe that the Rogue who has trusted you with all his secrets is a Rogue who is bent on taking a mean advantage of a fair relative?”

“I will wait a little,” Magdalen rejoined, “before I answer that question.  When I came down to tea, you told me you had been employing your mind for my benefit.  May I ask how?”

“By all means,” said Captain Wragge.  “You shall have the net result of the whole mental process.  Said process ranges over the present and future proceedings of your disconsolate friends, and of the lawyers who are helping them to find you.  Their present proceedings are, in all probability, assuming the following form:  the lawyer’s clerk has given you up at Mr. Huxtable’s, and has also, by this time, given you up, after careful inquiry, at all the hotels.  His last chance is that you may send for your box to the cloak-room—­you don’t send for it—­and there the clerk is to-night (thanks to Captain Wragge and Rosemary Lane) at the end of his resources.  He will forthwith communicate that fact to his employers in London; and those employers (don’t be alarmed!) will apply for help to the detective police.  Allowing for inevitable delays, a professional spy, with all his wits about him, and with those handbills to help him privately in identifying you, will be here certainly not later than the day after tomorrow—­possibly earlier.  If you remain in York, if you attempt to communicate with Mr. Huxtable, that spy will find you out.  If, on the other hand, you leave the city before he comes (taking your departure by other means than the railway, of course) you put him in the same predicament as the clerk—­you defy him to find a fresh trace of you.  There is my brief abstract of your present position.  What do you think of it?”