“I can trust my own experience as well,” said Magdalen.  “I have seen him, and spoken to him—­I know him better than you do.  Another disclosure, Captain Wragge, for your private ear!  I sent you back certain articles of costume when they had served the purpose for which I took them to London.  That purpose was to find my way to Noel Vanstone in disguise, and to judge for myself of Mrs. Lecount and her master.  I gained my object; and I tell you again, I know the two people in that house yonder whom we have now to deal with better than you do.”

Captain Wragge expressed the profound astonishment, and asked the innocent questions appropriate to the mental condition of a person taken completely by surprise.

“Well,” he resumed, when Magdalen had briefly answered him, “and what is the result on your own mind?  There must be a result, or we should not be here.  You see your way?  Of course, my dear girl, you see your way?”

“Yes,” she said, quickly.  “I see my way.”

The captain drew a little nearer to her, with eager curiosity expressed in every line of his vagabond face.

“Go on,” he said, in an anxious whisper; “pray go on.”

She looked out thoughtfully into the gathering darkness, without answering, without appearing to have heard him.  Her lips closed, and her clasped hands tightened mechanically round her knees.

“There is no disguising the fact,” said Captain Wragge, warily rousing her into speaking to him.  “The son is harder to deal with than the father—­”

“Not in my way,” she interposed, suddenly.

“Indeed!” said the captain.  “Well! they say there is a short cut to everything, if we only look long enough to find it.  You have looked long enough, I suppose, and the natural result has followed—­you have found it.”

“I have not troubled myself to look; I have found it without looking.”

“The deuce you have!” cried Captain Wragge, in great perplexity.  “My dear girl, is my view of your present position leading me altogether astray?  As I understand it, here is Mr. Noel Vanstone in possession of your fortune and your sister’s, as his father was, and determined to keep it, as his father was?”

“Yes.”

“And here are you—­quite helpless to get it by persuasion—­quite helpless to get it by law—­just as resolute in his ease as you were in his father’s, to take it by stratagem in spite of him?”

“Just as resolute.  Not for the sake of the fortune—­mind that!  For the sake of the right.”

“Just so.  And the means of coming at that right which were hard with the father—­who was not a miser—­are easy with the son, who is?”

“Perfectly easy.”

“Write me down an Ass for the first time in my life!” cried the captain, at the end of his patience.  “Hang me if I know what you mean!”

She looked round at him for the first time—­looked him straight and steadily in the face.