Anxiously as he tried to hide it, the change produced in his look and manner by the new feeling awakened in him was not a change which could be concealed from Mrs. Lecount.  On the second day she pointedly asked him whether he had not made an arrangement to call on the Bygraves.  He denied it as before.  “Perhaps you are going to-morrow, Mr. Noel?” persisted the housekeeper.  He was at the end of his resources; he was impatient to be rid of her inquiries; he trusted to his friend at North Shingles to help him; and this time he answered Yes.  “If you see the young lady,” proceeded Mrs. Lecount, “don’t forget that note of mine, sir, which you have in your waistcoat-pocket.”  No more was said on either side, but by that night’s post the housekeeper wrote to Miss Garth.  The letter merely acknowledged, with thanks, the receipt of Miss Garth’s communication, and informed her that in a few days Mrs. Lecount hoped to be in a position to write again and summon Mr. Pendril to Aldborough.

Late in the evening, when the parlor at North Shingles began to get dark, and when the captain rang the bell for candles as usual, he was surprised by hearing Magdalen’s voice in the passage telling the servant to take the lights downstairs again.  She knocked at the door immediately afterward, and glided into the obscurity of the room like a ghost.

“I have a question to ask you about your plans for to-morrow,” she said.  “My eyes are very weak this evening, and I hope you will not object to dispense with the candles for a few minutes.”

She spoke in low, stifled tones, and felt her way noiselessly to a chair far removed from the captain in the darkest part of the room.  Sitting near the window, he could just discern the dim outline of her dress, he could just hear the faint accents of her voice.  For the last two days he had seen nothing of her except during their morning walk.  On that afternoon he had found his wife crying in the little backroom down-stairs.  She could only tell him that Magdalen had frightened her—­that Magdalen was going the way again which she had gone when the letter came from China in the terrible past time at Vauxhall Walk.

“I was sorry to her that you were ill to-day, from Mrs. Wragge,” said the captain, unconsciously dropping his voice almost to a whisper as he spoke.

“It doesn’t matter,” she answered quietly, out of the darkness.  “I am strong enough to suffer, and live.  Other girls in my place would have been happier—­they would have suffered, and died.  It doesn’t matter; it will be all the same a hundred years hence.  Is he coming again tomorrow morning at seven o’clock?”

“He is coming, if you feel no objection to it.”

“I have no objection to make; I have done with objecting.  But I should like to have the time altered.  I don’t look my best in the early morning—–­I have bad nights, and I rise haggard and worn.  Write him a note this evening, and tell him to come at twelve o’clock.”