TOWARD six o’clock the next morning, the light pouring in on her face awoke Magdalen in the bedroom in Rosemary Lane.

She started from her deep, dreamless repose of the past night with that painful sense of bewilderment, on first waking, which is familiar to all sleepers in strange beds.  “Norah!” she called out mechanically, when she opened her eyes.  The next instant her mind roused itself, and her senses told her the truth.  She looked round the miserable room with a loathing recognition of it.  The sordid contrast which the place presented to all that she had been accustomed to see in her own bed-chamber—­the practical abandonment, implied in its scanty furniture, of those elegant purities of personal habit to which she had been accustomed from her childhood—­shocked that sense of bodily self-respect in Magdalen which is a refined woman’s second nature.  Contemptible as the influence seemed, when compared with her situation at that moment, the bare sight of the jug and basin in a corner of the room decided her first resolution when she woke.  She determined, then and there, to leave Rosemary Lane.

How was she to leave it?  With Captain Wragge, or without him?

She dressed herself, with a dainty shrinking from everything in the room which her hands or her clothes touched in the process, and then opened the window.  The autumn air felt keen and sweet; and the little patch of sky that she could see was warmly bright already with the new sunlight.  Distant voices of bargemen on the river, and the chirping of birds among the weeds which topped the old city wall, were the only sounds that broke the morning silence.  She sat down by the window; and searched her mind for the thoughts which she had lost, when weariness overcame her on the night before.

The first subject to which she returned was the vagabond subject of Captain Wragge.

The “moral agriculturist” had failed to remove her personal distrust of him, cunningly as he had tried to plead against it by openly confessing the impostures that he had practiced on others.  He had raised her opinion of his abilities; he had amused her by his humor; he had astonished her by his assurance; but he had left her original conviction that he was a Rogue exactly where it was when he first met with her.  If the one design then in her mind had been the design of going on the stage, she would, at all hazards, have rejected the more than doubtful assistance of Captain Wragge on the spot.

But the perilous journey on which she had now adventured herself had another end in view—­an end, dark and distant—­an end, with pitfalls hidden on the way to it, far other than the shallow pitfalls on the way to the stage.  In the mysterious stillness of the morning, her mind looked on to its second and its deeper design, and the despicable figure of the swindler rose before her in a new view.

She tried to shut him out—­to feel above him and beyond him again, as she had felt up to this time.