The captain’s reflections were not complicated by any unnecessary divergences from the contemplation of his own position to the contemplation of Magdalen’s.  Utterly incapable of appreciating the injury done her by Frank’s infamous treachery to his engagement—­an injury which had severed her, at one cruel blow, from the aspiration which, delusion though it was, had been the saving aspiration of her life—­Captain Wragge accepted the simple fact of her despair just as he found it, and then looked straight to the consequences of the proposal which she had made to him.

In the prospect before the marriage he saw nothing more serious involved than the practice of a deception, in no important degree different—­except in the end to be attained by it—­from the deceptions which his vagabond life had long since accustomed him to contemplate and to carry out.  In the prospect after the marriage he dimly discerned, through the ominous darkness of the future, the lurking phantoms of Terror and Crime, and the black gulfs behind them of Ruin and Death.  A man of boundless audacity and resource, within his own mean limits; beyond those limits, the captain was as deferentially submissive to the majesty of the law as the most harmless man in existence; as cautious in looking after his own personal safety as the veriest coward that ever walked the earth.  But one serious question now filled his mind.  Could he, on the terms proposed to him, join the conspiracy against Noel Vanstone up to the point of the marriage, and then withdraw from it, without risk of involving himself in the consequences which his experience told him must certainly ensue?

Strange as it may seem, his decision in this emergency was mainly influenced by no less a person than Noel Vanstone himself.  The captain might have resisted the money-offer which Magdalen had made to him—­for the profits of the Entertainment had filled his pockets with more than three times two hundred pounds.  But the prospect of dealing a blow in the dark at the man who had estimated his information and himself at the value of a five pound note proved too much for his caution and his self-control.  On the small neutral ground of self-importance, the best men and the worst meet on the same terms.  Captain Wragge’s indignation, when he saw the answer to his advertisement, stooped to no retrospective estimate of his own conduct; he was as deeply offended, as sincerely angry as if he had made a perfectly honorable proposal, and had been rewarded for it by a personal insult.  He had been too full of his own grievance to keep it out of his first letter to Magdalen.  He had more or less forgotten himself on every subsequent occasion when Noel Vanstone’s name was mentioned.  And in now finally deciding the course he should take, it is not too much to say that the motive of money receded, for the first time in his life, into the second place, and the motive of malice carried the day.