IF Captain Wragge could have looked into Mrs. Lecount’s room while he stood on the Parade watching the light in her window, he would have seen the housekeeper sitting absorbed in meditation over a worthless little morsel of brown stuff which lay on her toilet-table.

However exasperating to herself the conclusion might be, Mrs. Lecount could not fail to see that she had been thus far met and baffled successfully at every point.  What was she to do next?  If she sent for Mr. Pendril when he came to Aldborough (with only a few hours spared from his business at her disposal), what definite course would there be for him to follow?  If she showed Noel Vanstone the original letter from which her note had been copied, he would apply instantly to the writer for an explanation:  would expose the fabricated story by which Mrs. Lecount had succeeded in imposing on Miss Garth; and would, in any event, still declare, on the evidence of his own eyes, that the test by the marks on the neck had utterly failed.  Miss Vanstone, the elder, whose unexpected presence at Aldborough might have done wonders—­whose voice in the hall at North Shingles, even if she had been admitted no further, might have reached her sister’s ears and led to instant results—­Miss Vanstone, the elder, was out of the country, and was not likely to return for a month at least.  Look as anxiously as Mrs. Lecount might along the course which she had hitherto followed, she failed to see her way through the accumulated obstacles which now barred her advance.

Other women in this position might have waited until circumstances altered, and helped them.  Mrs. Lecount boldly retraced her steps, and determined to find her way to her end in a new direction.  Resigning for the present all further attempt to prove that the false Miss Bygrave was the true Magdalen Vanstone, she resolved to narrow the range of her next efforts; to leave the actual question of Magdalen’s identity untouched; and to rest satisfied with convincing her master of this simple fact—­that the young lady who was charming him at North Shingles, and the disguised woman who had terrified him in Vauxhall Walk, were one and the same person.

The means of effecting this new object were, to all appearance, far less easy of attainment than the means of effecting the object which Mrs. Lecount had just resigned.  Here no help was to be expected from others, no ostensibly benevolent motives could be put forward as a blind—­no appeal could be made to Mr. Pendril or to Miss Garth.  Here the housekeeper’s only chance of success depended, in the first place, on her being able to effect a stolen entrance into Mr. Bygrave’s house, and, in the second place, on her ability to discover whether that memorable alpaca dress from which she had secretly cut the fragment of stuff happened to form part of Miss Bygrave’s wardrobe.