“Stop, Mr. Vanstone,” said Magdalen.  “You are entirely mistaken in your estimate of the person you have to deal with.  You are seriously wrong in supposing that the marriage of the younger sister—­if she could be married in a week’s time—­would make any difference in the convictions which induced her to write to your father and to you.  I don’t deny that she may act from a mixture of motives.  I don’t deny that she clings to the hope of hastening her marriage, and to the hope of rescuing her sister from a life of dependence.  But if both those objects were accomplished by other means, nothing would induce her to leave you in possession of the inheritance which her father meant his children to have.  I know her, Mr. Vanstone!  She is a nameless, homeless, friendless wretch.  The law which takes care of you, the law which takes care of all legitimate children, casts her like carrion to the winds.  It is your law—­not hers.  She only knows it as the instrument of a vile oppression, an insufferable wrong.  The sense of that wrong haunts her like a possession of the devil.  The resolution to right that wrong burns in her like fire.  If that miserable girl was married and rich, with millions tomorrow, do you think she would move an inch from her purpose?  I tell you she would resist, to the last breath in her body, the vile injustice which has struck at the helpless children, through the calamity of their father’s death!  I tell you she would shrink from no means which a desperate woman can employ to force that closed hand of yours open, or die in the attempt!”

She stopped abruptly.  Once more her own indomitable earnestness had betrayed her.  Once more the inborn nobility of that perverted nature had risen superior to the deception which it had stooped to practice.  The scheme of the moment vanished from her mind’s view; and the resolution of her life burst its way outward in her own words, in her own tones, pouring hotly and more hotly from her heart.  She saw the abject manikin before her cowering, silent, in his chair.  Had his fears left him sense enough to perceive the change in her voice?  No:  his face spoke the truth—­his fears had bewildered him.  This time the chance of the moment had befriended her.  The door behind her chair had not opened again yet.  “No ears but his have heard me,” she thought, with a sense of unutterable relief.  “I have escaped Mrs. Lecount.”

She had done nothing of the kind.  Mrs. Lecount had never left the room.

After opening the door and closing it again, without going out, the housekeeper had noiselessly knelt down behind Magdalen’s chair.  Steadying herself against the post of the folding-door, she took a pair of scissors from her pocket, waited until Noel Vanstone (from whose view she was entirely hidden) had attracted Magdalen’s attention by speaking to her, and then bent forward, with the scissors ready in her hand.  The skirt of the false Miss Garth’s gown—­the brown alpaca dress, with the white spots on it—­touched