If Noel Vanstone could have looked into his counselor’s mind, he might have thought the captain’s advice excellently adapted to serve the captain’s interests.  As long as Mrs. Lecount could be kept in ignorance of her master’s visits to North Shingles, so long she would wait until the opportunity came for trying her experiment, and so long she might be trusted not to endanger the conspiracy by any further proceedings.  Necessarily incapable of viewing Captain Wragge’s advice under this aspect, Noel Vanstone simply looked at it as offering him a temporary means of escape from an explanation with his housekeeper.  He eagerly declared that the course of action suggested to him should be followed to the letter, and returned to Sea View without further delay.

On this occasion Captain Wragge’s anticipations were in no respect falsified by Mrs. Lecount’s conduct.  She had no suspicion of her master’s visit to North Shingles:  she had made up her mind, if necessary, to wait patiently for his interview with Miss Bygrave until the end of the week; and she did not embarrass him by any unexpected questions when he announced his intention of holding no personal communication with the Bygraves on that day.  All she said was, “Don’t you feel well enough, Mr. Noel? or don’t you feel inclined?” He answered, shortly, “I don’t feel well enough”; and there the conversation ended.

The next day the proceedings of the previous morning were exactly repeated.  This time Noel Vanstone went home rapturously with a keepsake in his breast-pocket; he had taken tender possession of one of Miss Bygrave’s gloves.  At intervals during the day, whenever he was alone, he took out the glove and kissed it with a devotion which was almost passionate in its fervor.  The miserable little creature luxuriated in his moments of stolen happiness with a speechless and stealthy delight which was a new sensation to him.  The few young girls whom he had met with, in his father’s narrow circle at Zurich, had felt a mischievous pleasure in treating him like a quaint little plaything; the strongest impression he could make on their hearts was an impression in which their lap-dogs might have rivaled him; the deepest interest he could create in them was the interest they might have felt in a new trinket or a new dress.  The only women who had hitherto invited his admiration, and taken his compliments seriously had been women whose charms were on the wane, and whose chances of marriage were fast failing them.  For the first time in his life he had now passed hours of happiness in the society of a beautiful girl, who had left him to think of her afterward without a single humiliating remembrance to lower him in his own esteem.