“There is perfect solitude within half an hour’s walk of the house,” replied the ready captain.

“Very well.  Come out, then.”

With a weary sigh she took up her straw bonnet and her light muslin scarf from the side-table upon which she had thrown them on coming in, and carelessly led the way to the door.  Captain Wragge followed her to the garden gate, then stopped, struck by a new idea.

“Excuse me,” he whispered, confidentially.  “In my wife’s existing state of ignorance as to who she is, we had better not trust her alone in the house with a new servant.  I’ll privately turn the key on her, in case she wakes before we come back.  Safe bind, safe find—­you know the proverb!—­I will be with you again in a moment.”

He hastened back to the house, and Magdalen seated herself on the garden wall to await his return.

She had hardly settled herself in that position when two gentlemen walking together, whose approach along the public path she had not previously noticed, passed close by her.

The dress of one of the two strangers showed him to be a clergyman.  His companion’s station in life was less easily discernible to ordinary observation.  Practiced eyes would probably have seen enough in his look, his manner, and his walk to show that he was a sailor.  He was a man in the prime of life; tall, spare, and muscular; his face sun-burned to a deep brown; his black hair just turning gray; his eyes dark, deep and firm—­the eyes of a man with an iron resolution and a habit of command.  He was the nearest of the two to Magdalen, as he and his friend passed the place where she was sitting; and he looked at her with a sudden surprise at her beauty, with an open, hearty, undisguised admiration, which was too evidently sincere, too evidently beyond his own control, to be justly resented as insolent; and yet, in her humor at that moment, Magdalen did resent it.  She felt the man’s resolute black eyes strike through her with an electric suddenness; and frowning at him impatiently, she turned away her head and looked back at the house.

The next moment she glanced round again to see if he had gone on.  He had advanced a few yards—­had then evidently stopped—­and was now in the very act of turning to look at her once more.  His companion, the clergyman, noticing that Magdalen appeared to be annoyed, took him familiarly by the arm, and, half in jest, half in earnest, forced him to walk on.  The two disappeared round the corner of the next house.  As they turned it, the sun-burned sailor twice stopped his companion again, and twice looked back.

“A friend of yours?” inquired Captain Wragge, joining Magdalen at that moment.

“Certainly not,” she replied; “a perfect stranger.  He stared at me in the most impertinent manner.  Does he belong to this place?”