traveled with them), were barely in time to catch the last train from London that evening.  It was late at night when they left the railway at the nearest station to Aldborough.  Captain Wragge had been strangely silent all through the journey.  His mind was ill at ease.  He had left Magdalen, under very critical circumstances, with no fit person to control her, and he was wholly ignorant of the progress of events in his absence at North Shingles.

CHAPTER XIII.

WHAT had happened at Aldborough in Captain Wragge’s absence?  Events had occurred which the captain’s utmost dexterity might have found it hard to remedy.

As soon as the chaise had left North Shingles, Mrs. Wragge received the message which her husband had charged the servant to deliver.  She hastened into the parlor, bewildered by her stormy interview with the captain, and penitently conscious that she had done wrong, without knowing what the wrong was.  If Magdalen’s mind had been unoccupied by the one idea of the marriage which now filled it—­if she had possessed composure enough to listen to Mrs. Wragge’s rambling narrative of what had happened during her interview with the housekeeper—­Mrs. Lecount’s visit to the wardrobe must, sooner or later, have formed part of the disclosure; and Magdalen, although she might never have guessed the truth, must at least have been warned that there was some element of danger lurking treacherously in the Alpaca dress.  As it was, no such consequence as this followed Mrs. Wragge’s appearance in the parlor; for no such consequence was now possible.

Events which had happened earlier in the morning, events which had happened for days and weeks past, had vanished as completely from Magdalen’s mind as if they had never taken place.  The horror of the coming Monday—­the merciless certainty implied in the appointment of the day and hour—­petrified all feeling in her, and annihilated all thought.  Mrs. Wragge made three separate attempts to enter on the subject of the housekeeper’s visit.  The first time she might as well have addressed herself to the wind, or to the sea.  The second attempt seemed likely to be more successful.  Magdalen sighed, listened for a moment indifferently, and then dismissed the subject.  “It doesn’t matter,” she said.  “The end has come all the same.  I’m not angry with you.  Say no more.”  Later in the day, from not knowing what else to talk about, Mrs. Wragge tried again.  This time Magdalen turned on her impatiently.  “For God’s sake, don’t worry me about trifles!  I can’t bear it.”  Mrs. Wragge closed her lips on the spot, and returned to the subject no more.  Magdalen, who had been kind to her at all other times, had angrily forbidden it.  The captain—­utterly ignorant of Mrs. Lecount’s interest in the secrets of the wardrobe—­had never so much as approached it.  All the information that he had extracted from his wife’s mental confusion, he had extracted