She was quite incapable of tracing the mental process which had led her to discovery.  She could not get sufficiently far from herself to see that her half-formed conclusions on the subject of the Bygraves had ended in making that family objects of suspicion to her; that the association of ideas had thereupon carried her mind back to that other object of suspicion which was represented by the conspiracy against her master; and that the two ideas of those two separate subjects of distrust, coming suddenly in contact, had struck the light.  She was not able to reason back in this way from the effect to the cause.  She could only feel that the suspicion had become more than a suspicion already:  conviction itself could not have been more firmly rooted in her mind.

Looking back at Magdalen by the new light now thrown on her, Mrs. Lecount would fain have persuaded herself that she recognized some traces left of the false Miss Garth’s face and figure in the graceful and beautiful girl who had sat at her master’s table hardly an hour since—­that she found resemblances now, which she had never thought of before, between the angry voice she had heard in Vauxhall Walk and the smooth, well-bred tones which still hung on her ears after the evening’s experience downstairs.  She would fain have persuaded herself that she had reached these results with no undue straining of the truth as she really knew it, but the effort was in vain.

Mrs. Lecount was not a woman to waste time and thought in trying to impose on herself.  She accepted the inevitable conclusion that the guesswork of a moment had led her to discovery.  And, more than that, she recognized the plain truth—­unwelcome as it was—­that the conviction now fixed in her own mind was thus far unsupported by a single fragment of producible evidence to justify it to the minds of others.

Under these circumstances, what was the safe course to take with her master?

If she candidly told him, when they met the next morning, what had passed through her mind that night, her knowledge of Noel Vanstone warned her that one of two results would certainly happen.  Either he would be angry and disputatious; would ask for proofs; and, finding none forthcoming, would accuse her of alarming him without a cause, to serve her own jealous end of keeping Magdalen out of the house; or he would be seriously startled, would clamor for the protection of the law, and would warn the Bygraves to stand on their defense at the outset.  If Magdalen only had been concerned in the plot this latter consequence would have assumed no great importance in the housekeeper’s mind.  But seeing the deception as she now saw it, she was far too clever a woman to fail in estimating the captain’s inexhaustible fertility of resource at its true value.  “If I can’t meet this impudent villain with plain proofs to help me,” thought Mrs. Lecount, “I may open my master s eyes to-morrow morning, and Mr. Bygrave will shut them up again before night.  The rascal is playing with all his own cards under the table, and he will win the game to a certainty, if he sees my hand at starting.”