Mrs. Wragge was dressed, armed at all points with her collection of circulars, and eager to be away by ten o’clock.  At an earlier hour Magdalen had provided for her being properly taken care of by the landlady’s eldest daughter—­a quiet, well-conducted girl, whose interest in the shopping expedition was readily secured by a little present of money for the purchase, on her own account, of a parasol and a muslin dress.  Shortly after ten o’clock Magdalen dismissed Mrs. Wragge and her attendant in a cab.  She then joined the landlady—­who was occupied in setting the rooms in order upstairs—­with the object of ascertaining, by a little well-timed gossip, what the daily habits might be of the inmates of the house.

She discovered that there were no other lodgers but Mrs. Wragge and herself.  The landlady’s husband was away all day, employed at a railway station.  Her second daughter was charged with the care of the kitchen in the elder sister’s absence.  The younger children were at school, and would be back at one o’clock to dinner.  The landlady herself “got up fine linen for ladies,” and expected to be occupied over her work all that morning in a little room built out at the back of the premises.  Thus there was every facility for Magdalen’s leaving the house in disguise, and leaving it unobserved, provided she went out before the children came back to dinner at one o’clock.

By eleven o’clock the apartments were set in order, and the landlady had retired to pursue her own employments.  Magdalen softly locked the door of her room, drew the blind over the window, and entered at once on her preparations for the perilous experiment of the day.

The same quick perception of dangers to be avoided and difficulties to be overcome which had warned her to leave the extravagant part of her character costume in the box at Birmingham now kept her mind fully alive to the vast difference between a disguise worn by gas-light for the amusement of an audience and a disguise assumed by daylight to deceive the searching eyes of two strangers.  The first article of dress which she put on was an old gown of her own (made of the material called “alpaca"), of a dark-brown color, with a neat pattern of little star-shaped spots in white.  A double flounce running round the bottom of this dress was the only milliner’s ornament which it presented—­an ornament not at all out of character with the costume appropriated to an elderly lady.  The disguise of her head and face was the next object of her attention.  She fitted and arranged the gray wig with the dexterity which constant practice had given her; fixed the false eyebrows (made rather large, and of hair darker than the wig) carefully in their position with the gum she had with her for the purpose, and stained her face with the customary stage materials, so as to change the transparent fairness of her complexion to the dull, faintly opaque color of a woman in ill health.  The lines and markings of age followed next; and here