reserve with his servants, promised, in appearance, much, and performed in reality nothing.  No matter how diffidently or how respectfully Magdalen might presume on her master’s example, and on her master’s evident liking for her, the old man instantly discovered the advance she was making from her proper position, and instantly put her back in it again, with a quaint good humor which inflicted no pain, but with a blunt straightforwardness of purpose which permitted no escape.  Contradictory as it may sound, Admiral Bartram was too familiar to be approached; he kept the distance between himself and his servant more effectually than if he had been the proudest man in England.  The systematic reserve of a superior toward an inferior may be occasionally overcome—­the systematic familiarity never.

Slowly the time dragged on.  The fourth week came; and Magdalen had made no new discoveries.  The prospect was depressing in the last degree.  Even in the apparently hopeless event of her devising a means of getting at the admiral’s keys, she could not count on retaining possession of them unsuspected more than a few hours—­hours which might be utterly wasted through her not knowing in what direction to begin the search.  The Trust might be locked up in any one of some twenty receptacles for papers, situated in four different rooms; and which room was the likeliest to look in, which receptacle was the most promising to begin with, which position among other heaps of papers the one paper needful might be expected to occupy, was more than she could say.  Hemmed in by immeasurable uncertainties on every side; condemned, as it were, to wander blindfold on the very brink of success, she waited for the chance that never came, for the event that never happened, with a patience which was sinking already into the patience of despair.

Night after night she looked back over the vanished days, and not an event rose on her memory to distinguish them one from the other.  The only interruptions to the weary uniformity of the life at St. Crux were caused by the characteristic delinquencies of old Mazey and the dogs.

At certain intervals, the original wildness broke out in the natures of Brutus and Cassius.  The modest comforts of home, the savory charms of made dishes, the decorous joy of digestions accomplished on hearth-rugs, lost all their attractions, and the dogs ungratefully left the house to seek dissipation and adventure in the outer world.  On these occasions the established after-dinner formula of question and answer between old Mazey and his master varied a little in one particular.  “God bless the Queen, Mazey,” and “How’s the wind, Mazey?” were followed by a new inquiry:  “Where are the dogs, Mazey?” “Out on the loose, your honor, and be damned to ’em,” was the veteran’s unvarying answer.  The admiral always sighed and shook his head gravely at the news, as if Brutus and Cassius had been sons of his own, who treated him with a want of proper filial respect.