Before unlocking the door, she looked about her carefully, to make sure that none of her stage materials were exposed to view in case the landlady entered the room in her absence.  The only forgotten object belonging to her that she discovered was a little packet of Norah’s letters which she had been reading overnight, and which had been accidentally pushed under the looking-glass while she was engaged in dressing herself.  As she took up the letters to put them away, the thought struck her for the first time, “Would Norah know me now if we met each other in the street?” She looked in the glass, and smiled sadly.  “No,” she said, “not even Norah.”

She unlocked the door, after first looking at her watch.  It was close on twelve o’clock.  There was barely an hour left to try her desperate experiment, and to return to the lodging before the landlady’s children came back from school.

An instant’s listening on the landing assured her that all was quiet in the passage below.  She noiselessly descended the stairs and gained the street without having met any living creature on her way out of the house.  In another minute she had crossed the road, and had knocked at Noel Vanstone’s door.

The door was opened by the same woman-servant whom she had followed on the previous evening to the stationer’s shop.  With a momentary tremor, which recalled the memorable first night of her appearance in public, Magdalen inquired (in Miss Garth’s voice, and with Miss Garth’s manner) for Mrs. Lecount.

“Mrs. Lecount has gone out, ma’am,” said the servant.

“Is Mr. Vanstone at home?” asked Magdalen, her resolution asserting itself at once against the first obstacle that opposed it.

“My master is not up yet, ma’am.”

Another check!  A weaker nature would have accepted the warning.  Magdalen’s nature rose in revolt against it.

“What time will Mrs. Lecount be back?” she asked.

“About one o’clock, ma’am.”

“Say, if you please, that I will call again as soon after one o’clock as possible.  I particularly wish to see Mrs. Lecount.  My name is Miss Garth.”

She turned and left the house.  Going back to her own room was out of the question.  The servant (as Magdalen knew by not hearing the door close) was looking after her; and, moreover, she would expose herself, if she went indoors, to the risk of going out again exactly at the time when the landlady’s children were sure to be about the house.  She turned mechanically to the right, walked on until she recalled Vauxhall Bridge, and waited there, looking out over the river.

The interval of unemployed time now before her was nearly an hour.  How should she occupy it?