The entrance of the servant, uncalled, roused her.  With a heavy sigh, the cold and secret woman folded the letter up again and addressed herself to the interests and the duties of the passing time.

She decided the question of going or not going to Zurich, after a very brief consideration of it.  Before she had drawn her chair to the breakfast-table she had resolved to go.

Admirably as Captain Wragge’s stratagem had worked, it might have failed—­unassisted by the occurrence of the morning—­to achieve this result.  The very accident against which it had been the captain’s chief anxiety to guard—­the accident which had just taken place in spite of him—­was, of all the events that could have happened, the one event which falsified every previous calculation, by directly forwarding the main purpose of the conspiracy!  If Mrs. Lecount had not obtained the information of which she was in search before the receipt of the letter from Zurich, the letter might have addressed her in vain.  She would have hesitated before deciding to leave England, and that hesitation might have proved fatal to the captain’s scheme.

As it was, with the plain proofs in her possession, with the gown discovered in Magdalen’s wardrobe, with the piece cut out of it in her own pocketbook, and with the knowledge, obtained from Mrs. Wragge, of the very house in which the disguise had been put on, Mrs. Lecount had now at her command the means of warning Noel Vanstone as she had never been able to warn him yet, or, in other words, the means of guarding against any dangerous tendencies toward reconciliation with the Bygraves which might otherwise have entered his mind during her absence at Zurich.  The only difficulty which now perplexed her was the difficulty of deciding whether she should communicate with her master personally or by writing, before her departure from England.

She looked again at the doctor’s letter.  The word “instantly,” in the sentence which summoned her to her dying brother, was twice underlined.  Admiral Bartram’s house was at some distance from the railway; the time consumed in driving to St. Crux, and driving back again, might be time fatally lost on the journey to Zurich.  Although she would infinitely have preferred a personal interview with Noel Vanstone, there was no choice on a matter of life and death but to save the precious hours by writing to him.

After sending to secure a place at once in the early coach, she sat down to write to her master.

Her first thought was to tell him all that had happened at North Shingles that morning.  On reflection, however, she rejected the idea.  Once already (in copying the personal description from Miss Garth’s letter) she had trusted her weapons in her master’s hands, and Mr. Bygrave had contrived to turn them against her.  She resolved this time to keep them strictly in her own possession.  The secret of the missing fragment of the Alpaca dress was known to no living creature but herself; and, until her return to England, she determined to keep it to herself.  The necessary impression might be produced on Noel Vanstone’s mind without venturing into details.  She knew by experience the form of letter which might be trusted to produce an effect on him, and she now wrote it in these words: