“Is he coming again to-day?” she asked, pushing away from her the chair which Captain Wragge offered, with such violence that she threw it on the floor.

“Yes,” said the captain, wisely answering her in the fewest words.  “He is coming at two o’clock.”

“Take me away!” she exclaimed, tossing her hair back wildly from her face.  “Take me away before he comes.  I can’t get over the horror of marrying him while I am in this hateful place; take me somewhere where I can forget it, or I shall go mad!  Give me two days’ rest—­two days out of sight of that horrible sea—­two days out of prison in this horrible house—­two days anywhere in the wide world away from Aldborough.  I’ll come back with you!  I’ll go through with it to the end!  Only give me two days’ escape from that man and everything belonging to him!  Do you hear, you villain?” she cried, seizing his arm and shaking it in a frenzy of passion; “I have been tortured enough—­I can bear it no longer!”

There was but one way of quieting her, and the captain instantly took it.

“If you will try to control yourself,” he said, “you shall leave Aldborough in an hour’s time.”

She dropped his arm, and leaned back heavily against the wall behind her.

“I’ll try,” she answered, struggling for breath, but looking at him less wildly.  “You shan’t complain of me, if I can help it.”  She attempted confusedly to take her handkerchief from her apron pocket, and failed to find it.  The captain took it out for her.  Her eyes softened, and she drew her breath more freely as she received the handkerchief from him.  “You are a kinder man than I thought you were,” she said; “I am sorry I spoke so passionately to you just now—­I am very, very sorry.”  The tears stole into her eyes, and she offered him her hand with the native grace and gentleness of happier days.  “Be friends with me again,” she said, pleadingly.  “I’m only a girl, Captain Wragge—­I’m only a girl!”

He took her hand in silence, patted it for a moment, and then opened the door for her to go back to her own room again.  There was genuine regret in his face as he showed her that trifling attention.  He was a vagabond and a cheat; he had lived a mean, shuffling, degraded life, but he was human; and she had found her way to the lost sympathies in him which not even the self-profanation of a swindler’s existence could wholly destroy.  “Damn the breakfast!” he said, when the servant came in for her orders.  “Go to the inn directly, and say I want a carriage and pair at the door in an hour’s time.”  He went out into the passage, still chafing under a sense of mental disturbance which was new to him, and shouted to his wife more fiercely than ever—­“Pack up what we want for a week’s absence, and be ready in half an hour!” Having issued those directions, he returned to the breakfast-room, and looked at the half-spread table with an impatient wonder at his disinclination to do justice to his own meal.  “She has rubbed off the edge of my appetite,” he said to himself, with a forced laugh.  “I’ll try a cigar, and a turn in the fresh air.”