From that moment events hurried with a headlong rapidity to the parting scene.  They were back at the house while the words of the Marriage Service seemed still ringing in their ears.  Before they had been five minutes indoors the carriage drew up at the garden gate.  In a minute more the opportunity came for which Magdalen and the captain had been on the watch—­the opportunity of speaking together in private for the last time.  She still preserved her icy resignation; she seemed beyond all reach now of the fear that had once mastered her, of the remorse that had once tortured her soul.  With a firm hand she gave him the promised money.  With a firm face she looked her last at him.  “I’m not to blame,” he whispered, eagerly; “I have only done what you asked me.”  She bowed her head; she bent it toward him kindly and let him touch her fore-head with his lips.  “Take care!” he said.  “My last words are—­for God’s sake take care when I’m gone!” She turned from him with a smile, and spoke her farewell words to his wife.  Mrs. Wragge tried hard to face her loss bravely—­the loss of the friend whose presence had fallen like light from Heaven over the dim pathway of her life.  “You have been very good to me, my dear; I thank you kindly; I thank you with all my heart.”  She could say no more; she clung to Magdalen in a passion of tears, as her mother might have clung to her, if her mother had lived to see that horrible day.  “I’m frightened for you!” cried the poor creature, in a wild, wailing voice.  “Oh, my darling, I’m frightened for you!” Magdalen desperately drew herself free—­kissed her—­and hurried out to the door.  The expression of that artless gratitude, the cry of that guileless love, shook her as nothing else had shaken her that day.  It was a refuge to get to the carriage—­a refuge, though the man she had married stood there waiting for her at the door.

Mrs. Wragge tried to follow her into the garden.  But the captain had seen Magdalen’s face as she ran out, and he steadily held his wife back in the passage.  From that distance the last farewells were exchanged.  As long as the carriage was in sight, Magdalen looked back at them; she waved her handkerchief as she turned the corner.  In a moment more the last thread which bound her to them was broken; the familiar companionship of many months was a thing of the past already!

Captain Wragge closed the house door on the idlers who were looking in from the Parade.  He led his wife back into the sitting-room, and spoke to her with a forbearance which she had never yet experienced from him.

“She has gone her way,” he said, “and in another hour we shall have gone ours.  Cry your cry out—­I don’t deny she’s worth crying for.”

Even then—­even when the dread of Magdalen’s future was at its darkest in his mind—­the ruling habit of the man’s life clung to him.  Mechanically he unlocked his dispatch-box.  Mechanically he opened his Book of Accounts, and made the closing entry—­the entry of his last transaction with Magdalen—­in black and white.  “By Rec’d from Miss Vanstone,” wrote the captain, with a gloomy brow, “Two hundred pounds.”