Taking the difficulties now before her in their order as they occurred, Mrs. Lecount first resolved to devote the next few days to watching the habits of the inmates of North Shingles, from early in the morning to late at night, and to testing the capacity of the one servant in the house to resist the temptation of a bribe.  Assuming that results proved successful, and that, either by money or by stratagem, she gained admission to North Shingles (without the knowledge of Mr. Bygrave or his niece), she turned next to the second difficulty of the two—­the difficulty of obtaining access to Miss Bygrave’s wardrobe.

If the servant proved corruptible, all obstacles in this direction might be considered as removed beforehand.  But if the servant proved honest, the new problem was no easy one to solve.

Long and careful consideration of the question led the housekeeper at last to the bold resolution of obtaining an interview—­if the servant failed her—­with Mrs. Bygrave herself.  What was the true cause of this lady’s mysterious seclusion?  Was she a person of the strictest and the most inconvenient integrity? or a person who could not be depended on to preserve a secret? or a person who was as artful as Mr. Bygrave himself, and who was kept in reserve to forward the object of some new deception which was yet to come?  In the first two cases, Mrs. Lecount could trust in her own powers of dissimulation, and in the results which they might achieve.  In the last case (if no other end was gained), it might be of vital importance to her to discover an enemy hidden in the dark.  In any event, she determined to run the risk.  Of the three chances in her favor on which she had reckoned at the outset of the struggle—­the chance of entrapping Magdalen by word of mouth, the chance of entrapping her by the help of her friends, and the chance of entrapping her by means of Mrs. Bygrave—­two had been tried, and two had failed.  The third remained to be tested yet; and the third might succeed.

So, the captain’s enemy plotted against him in the privacy of her own chamber, while the captain watched the light in her window from the beach outside.

Before breakfast the next morning, Captain Wragge posted the forged letter to Zurich with his own hand.  He went back to North Shingles with his mind not quite decided on the course to take with Mrs. Lecount during the all-important interval of the next ten days.

Greatly to his surprise, his doubts on this point were abruptly decided by Magdalen herself.

He found her waiting for him in the room where the breakfast was laid.  She was walking restlessly to and fro, with her head drooping on her bosom and her hair hanging disordered over her shoulders.  The moment she looked up on his entrance, the captain felt the fear which Mrs. Wragge had felt before him—­the fear that her mind would be struck prostrate again, as it had been struck once already, when Frank’s letter reached her in Vauxhall Walk.