Magdalen’s third and last attempt at solving the mystery of the truckle-bed was made while she was waiting on the admiral at dinner.  The old gentleman’s questions gave her an opportunity of referring to the subject, without any appearance of presumption or disrespect; but he proved to be quite as impenetrable, in his way, as old Mazey and Mrs. Drake had been in theirs.  “It doesn’t concern you, my dear,” said the admiral, bluntly.  “Don’t be curious.  Look in your Old Testament when you go downstairs, and see what happened in the Garden of Eden through curiosity.  Be a good girl, and don’t imitate your mother Eve.”

Late at night, as Magdalen passed the end of the second-floor passage, proceeding alone on her way up to her own room, she stopped and listened.  A screen was placed at the entrance of the corridor, so as to hide it from the view of persons passing on the stairs.  The snoring she heard on the other side of the screen encouraged her to slip round it, and to advance a few steps.  Shading the light of her candle with her hand, she ventured close to the admiral’s door, and saw, to her surprise, that the bed had been moved since she had seen it in the day-time, so as to stand exactly across the door, and to bar the way entirely to any one who might attempt to enter the admiral’s room.  After this discovery, old Mazey himself, snoring lustily, with the red fisherman’s cap pulled down to his eyebrows, and the blankets drawn up to his nose, became an object of secondary importance only, by comparison with his bed.  That the veteran did actually sleep on guard before his master’s door, and that he and the admiral and the housekeeper were in the secret of this unaccountable proceeding, was now beyond all doubt.

“A strange end,” thought Magdalen, pondering over her discovery as she stole upstairs to her own sleeping-room—­“a strange end to a strange day!”

CHAPTER II.

THE first week passed, the second week passed, and Magdalen was, to all appearance, no nearer to the discovery of the Secret Trust than on the day when she first entered on her service at St. Crux.

But the fortnight, uneventful as it was, had not been a fortnight lost.  Experience had already satisfied her on one important point—­experience had shown that she could set the rooted distrust of the other servants safely at defiance.  Time had accustomed the women to her presence in the house, without shaking the vague conviction which possessed them all alike, that the newcomer was not one of themselves.  All that Magdalen could do in her own defense was to keep the instinctive female suspicion of her confined within those purely negative limits which it had occupied from the first, and this she accomplished.