The captain’s habitual penetration had not misled him.  As soon as the door of Sea-view Cottage was closed on the parting guests, Mrs. Lecount made an effort to assert the authority which Magdalen’s influence was threatening already.

She employed every artifice of which she was mistress to ascertain Magdalen’s true position in Noel Vanstone’s estimation.  She tried again and again to lure him into an unconscious confession of the pleasure which he felt already in the society of the beautiful Miss Bygrave; she twined herself in and out of every weakness in his character, as the frogs and efts twined themselves in and out of the rock-work of her Aquarium.  But she made one serious mistake which very clever people in their intercourse with their intellectual inferiors are almost universally apt to commit—­she trusted implicitly to the folly of a fool.  She forgot that one of the lowest of human qualities—­cunning—­is exactly the capacity which is often most largely developed in the lowest of intellectual natures.  If she had been honestly angry with her master, she would probably have frightened him.  If she had opened her mind plainly to his view, she would have astonished him by presenting a chain of ideas to his limited perceptions which they were not strong enough to grasp; his curiosity would have led him to ask for an explanation; and by practicing on that curiosity, she might have had him at her mercy.  As it was, she set her cunning against his, and the fool proved a match for her.  Noel Vanstone, to whom all large-minded motives under heaven were inscrutable mysteries, saw the small-minded motive at the bottom of his housekeeper’s conduct with as instantaneous a penetration as if he had been a man of the highest ability.  Mrs. Lecount left him for the night, foiled, and knowing she was foiled—­left him, with the tigerish side of her uppermost, and a low-lived longing in her elegant finger-nails to set them in her master’s face.

She was not a woman to be beaten by one defeat or by a hundred.  She was positively determined to think, and think again, until she had found a means of checking the growing intimacy with the Bygraves at once and forever.  In the solitude of her own room she recovered her composure, and set herself for the first time to review the conclusions which she had gathered from the events of the day.

There was something vaguely familiar to her in the voice of this Miss Bygrave, and, at the same time, in unaccountable contradiction, something strange to her as well.  The face and figure of the young lady were entirely new to her.  It was a striking face, and a striking figure; and if she had seen either at any former period, she would certainly have remembered it.  Miss Bygrave was unquestionably a stranger; and yet—­