those threatening words, in Vauxhall Wall, I will engage to leave your service at a day’s notice; and I will atone for the sin of bearing false witness against my neighbor by resigning every claim I have to your grateful remembrance, on your father’s account as well as on your own.  I make this engagement without reserves of any kind; and I promise to abide by it—­if my proofs fail—­on the faith of a good Catholic, and the word of an honest woman.  Your faithful servant,

“VIRGINIE LECOUNT.”

The closing sentences of this letter—­as the housekeeper well knew when she wrote them—­embodied the one appeal to Noel Vanstone which could be certainly trusted to produce a deep and lasting effect.  She might have staked her oath, her life, or her reputation, on proving the assertion which she had made, and have failed to leave a permanent impression on his mind.  But when she staked not only her position in his service, but her pecuniary claims on him as well, she at once absorbed the ruling passion of his life in expectation of the result.  There was not a doubt of it, in the strongest of all his interests—­the interest of saving his money—­he would wait.

“Checkmate for Mr. Bygrave!” thought Mrs. Lecount, as she sealed and directed the letter.  “The battle is over—­the game is played out.”

While Mrs. Lecount was providing for her master’s future security at Sea View, events were in full progress at North Shingles.

As soon as Captain Wragge recovered his astonishment at the housekeeper’s appearance on his own premises, he hurried into the house, and, guided by his own forebodings of the disaster that had happened, made straight for his wife’s room.

Never, in all her former experience, had poor Mrs. Wragge felt the full weight of the captain’s indignation as she felt it now.  All the little intelligence she naturally possessed vanished at once in the whirlwind of her husband’s rage.  The only plain facts which he could extract from her were two in number.  In the first place, Magdalen’s rash desertion of her post proved to have no better reason to excuse it than Magdalen’s incorrigible impatience:  she had passed a sleepless night; she had risen feverish and wretched; and she had gone out, reckless of all consequences, to cool her burning head in the fresh air.  In the second place, Mrs. Wragge had, on her own confession, seen Mrs. Lecount, had talked with Mrs. Lecount, and had ended by telling Mrs. Lecount the story of the ghost.  Having made these discoveries, Captain Wragge wasted no time in contending with his wife’s terror and confusion.  He withdrew at once to a window which commanded an uninterrupted prospect of Noel Vanstone’s house, and there established himself on the watch for events at Sea View, precisely as Mrs. Lecount had established herself on the watch for events at North Shingles.