The conclusions which the captain drew, after gaining his information, were clear and easily stated.

On the adverse side of the question, he expressed his conviction that Mrs. Lecount had certainly detected her visitor to be disguised; that she had never really left the room, though she might have opened and shut the door; and that on both the occasions, therefore, when Magdalen had been betrayed into speaking in her own voice, Mrs. Lecount had heard her.  On the favorable side of the question, he was perfectly satisfied that the painted face and eyelids, the wig, and the padded cloak had so effectually concealed Magdalen’s identity, that she might in her own person defy the housekeeper’s closest scrutiny, so far as the matter of appearance was concerned.  The difficulty of deceiving Mrs. Lecount’s ears, as well as her eyes, was, he readily admitted, not so easily to be disposed of.  But looking to the fact that Magdalen, on both the occasions when she had forgotten herself, had spoken in the heat of anger, he was of opinion that her voice had every reasonable chance of escaping detection, if she carefully avoided all outbursts of temper for the future, and spoke in those more composed and ordinary tones which Mrs. Lecount had not yet heard.  Upon the whole, the captain was inclined to pronounce the prospect hopeful, if one serious obstacle were cleared away at the outset—­that obstacle being nothing less than the presence on the scene of action of Mrs. Wragge.

To Magdalen’s surprise, when the course of her narrative brought her to the story of the ghost, Captain Wragge listened with the air of a man who was more annoyed than amused by what he heard.  When she had done, he plainly told her that her unlucky meeting on the stairs of the lodging-house with Mrs. Wragge was, in his opinion, the most serious of all the accidents that had happened in Vauxhall Walk.

“I can deal with the difficulty of my wife’s stupidity,” he said, “as I have often dealt with it before.  I can hammer her new identity into her head, but I can’t hammer the ghost out of it.  We have no security that the woman in the gray cloak and poke bonnet may not come back to her recollection at the most critical time, and under the most awkward circumstances.  In plain English, my dear girl, Mrs. Wragge is a pitfall under our feet at every step we take.”

“If we are aware of the pitfall,” said Magdalen, “we can take our measures for avoiding it.  What do you propose?”

“I propose,” replied the captain, “the temporary removal of Mrs. Wragge.  Speaking purely in a pecuniary point of view, I can’t afford a total separation from her.  You have often read of very poor people being suddenly enriched by legacies reaching them from remote and unexpected quarters?  Mrs. Wragge’s case, when I married her, was one of these.  An elderly female relative shared the favors of fortune on that occasion with my wife; and if I only keep up domestic appearances, I happen to