He waited again for an answer, and again she remained silent.  The captain tried for the third time in another direction.

“Did you get any letters this morning?” he went on.  “Is there bad news again from home?  Any fresh difficulties with your sister?”

“Say nothing about my sister!” she broke out passionately.  “Neither you nor I are fit to speak of her.”

She said those words at the garden-gate, and hurried into the house by herself.  He followed her, and heard the door of her own room violently shut to, violently locked and double-locked.  Solacing his indignation by an oath, Captain Wragge sullenly went into one of the parlors on the ground-floor to look after his wife.  The room communicated with a smaller and darker room at the back of the house by means of a quaint little door with a window in the upper half of it.  Softly approaching this door, the captain lifted the white muslin curtain which hung over the window, and looked into the inner room.

There was Mrs. Wragge, with her cap on one side, and her shoes down at heel; with a row of pins between her teeth; with the Oriental Cashmere Robe slowly slipping off the table; with her scissors suspended uncertain in one hand, and her written directions for dressmaking held doubtfully in the other—­so absorbed over the invincible difficulties of her employment as to be perfectly unconscious that she was at that moment the object of her husband’s superintending eye.  Under other circumstances she would have been soon brought to a sense of her situation by the sound of his voice.  But Captain Wragge was too anxious about Magdalen to waste any time on his wife, after satisfying himself that she was safe in her seclusion, and that she might be trusted to remain there.

He left the parlor, and, after a little hesitation in the passage, stole upstairs and listened anxiously outside Magdalen’s door.  A dull sound of sobbing—­a sound stifled in her handkerchief, or stifled in the bed-clothes—­was all that caught his ear.  He returned at once to the ground-floor, with some faint suspicion of the truth dawning on his mind at last.

“The devil take that sweetheart of hers!” thought the captain.  “Mr. Noel Vanstone has raised the ghost of him at starting.”

CHAPTER V.

WHEN Magdalen appeared in the parlor shortly before seven o’clock, not a trace of discomposure was visible in her manner.  She looked and spoke as quietly and unconcernedly as usual.

The lowering distrust on Captain Wragge’s face cleared away at the sight of her.  There had been moments during the afternoon when he had seriously doubted whether the pleasure of satisfying the grudge he owed to Noel Vanstone, and the prospect of earning the sum of two hundred pounds, would not be dearly purchased by running the risk of discovery to which Magdalen’s uncertain temper might expose him at any hour of the day.  The plain proof now before him of her powers of self-control relieved his mind of a serious anxiety.  It mattered little to the captain what she suffered in the privacy of her own chamber, as long as she came out of it with a face that would bear inspection, and a voice that betrayed nothing.