In half an hour more she and Mrs. Wragge were seated together in the carriage.  One of the horses was restive at starting.  “Flog him,” she cried angrily to the driver.  “What are you frightened about?  Flog him!  Suppose the carriage was upset,” she said, turning suddenly to her companion; “and suppose I was thrown out and killed on the spot?  Nonsense! don’t look at me in that way.  I’m like your husband; I have a dash of humor, and I’m only joking.”

They were out the whole day.  When they reached home again, it was after dark.  The long succession of hours passed in the fresh air left them both with the same sense of fatigue.  Again that night Magdalen slept the deep dreamless sleep of the night before.  And so the Friday closed.

Her last thought at night had been the thought which had sustained her throughout the day.  She had laid her head on the pillow with the same reckless resolution to submit to the coming trial which had already expressed itself in words when she and Mrs. Wragge met by accident on the stairs.  When she woke on the morning of Saturday, the resolution was gone.  The Friday’s thoughts—­the Friday’s events even—­were blotted out of her mind.  Once again, creeping chill through the flow of her young blood, she felt the slow and deadly prompting of despair which had come to her in the waning moonlight, which had whispered to her in the awful calm.

“I saw the end as the end must be,” she said to herself, “on Thursday night.  I have been wrong ever since.”

When she and her companion met that morning, she reiterated her complaint of suffering from the toothache; she repeated her refusal to allow Mrs. Wragge to procure a remedy; she left the house after breakfast, in the direction of the chemist’s shop, exactly as she had left it on the morning before.

This time she entered the shop without an instant’s hesitation.

“I have got an attack of toothache,” she said, abruptly, to an elderly man who stood behind the counter.

“May I look at the tooth, miss?”

“There is no necessity to look.  It is a hollow tooth.  I think I have caught cold in it.”

The chemist recommended various remedies which were in vogue fifteen years since.  She declined purchasing any of them.

“I have always found Laudanum relieve the pain better than anything else,” she said, trifling with the bottles on the counter, and looking at them while she spoke, instead of looking at the chemist.  “Let me have some Laudanum.”

“Certainly, miss.  Excuse my asking the question—­it is only a matter of form.  You are staying at Aldborough, I think?”

“Yes.  I am Miss Bygrave, of North Shingles.”

The chemist bowed; and, turning to his shelves, filled an ordinary half-ounce bottle with laudanum immediately.  In ascertaining his customer’s name and address beforehand, the owner of the shop had taken a precaution which was natural to a careful man, but which was by no means universal, under similar circumstances, in the state of the law at that time.