“Let that dress alone, if you please,” said Louisa, as quietly as ever.
“What did you say?” inquired the other, doubting whether her ears had not deceived her.
“I said, let that dress alone. It belongs to my mistress, and I have my mistress’s orders to pack up everything in the room. You are not helping me by coming here—you are very much in my way.”
“Well!” said the house-servant, “you may be London bred, as they say. But if these are your London manners, give me Suffolk!” She opened the door with an angry snatch at the handle, shut it violently, opened it again, and looked in. “Give me Suffolk!” said the house-servant, with a parting nod of her head to point the edge of her sarcasm.
Louisa proceeded impenetrably with her packing up.
Having neatly disposed of the linen in the smaller box, she turned her attention to the dresses next. After passing them carefully in review, to ascertain which was the least valuable of the collection, and to place that one at the bottom of the trunk for the rest to lie on, she made her choice with very little difficulty. The first gown which she put into the box was—the brown Alpaca dress.
Meanwhile Magdalen had joined the captain downstairs. Although he could not fail to notice the languor in her face and the listlessness of all her movements, he was relieved to find that she met him with perfect composure. She was even self-possessed enough to ask him for news of his journey, with no other signs of agitation than a passing change of color and a little trembling of the lips.
“So much for the past,” said Captain Wragge, when his narrative of the expedition to London by way of St. Crux had come to an end. “Now for the present. The bridegroom—”
“If it makes no difference,” she interposed, “call him Mr. Noel Vanstone.”
“With all my heart. Mr. Noel Vanstone is coming here this afternoon to dine and spend the evening. He will be tiresome in the last degree; but, like all tiresome people, he is not to be got rid of on any terms. Before he comes, I have a last word or two of caution for your private ear. By this time to-morrow we shall have parted—without any certain knowledge, on either side, of our ever meeting again. I am anxious to serve your interests faithfully to the last; I am anxious you should feel that I have done all I could for your future security when we say good-by.”
Magdalen looked at him in surprise. He spoke in altered tones. He was agitated; he was strangely in earnest. Something in his look and manner took her memory back to the first night at Aldborough, when she had opened her mind to him in the darkening solitude—when they two had sat together alone on the slope of the martello tower. “I have no reason to think otherwise than kindly of you,” she said.
Captain Wragge suddenly left his chair, and took a turn backward and forward in the room. Magdalen’s last words seemed to have produced some extraordinary disturbance in him.