“Property!” cried Noel Vanstone, mistaking the captain, and letting the truth escape him through sheer inability to conceal his fears any longer.  “I don’t know what amount of property she won’t claim.  She’ll make me pay for my father as well as for myself.  Thousands, Mr. Bygrave—­thousands of pounds sterling out of my pocket!!!” He clasped his hands in despair at the picture of pecuniary compulsion which his fancy had conjured up—­his own golden life-blood spouting from him in great jets of prodigality, under the lancet of Mrs. Lecount.

“Gently, Mr. Vanstone—­gently!  The woman knows nothing so far, and the money is not gone yet.”

“No, no; the money is not gone, as you say.  I’m only nervous about it; I can’t help being nervous.  You were saying something just now; you were going to give me advice.  I value your advice; you don’t know how highly I value your advice.”  He said those words with a conciliatory smile which was more than helpless; it was absolutely servile in its dependence on his judicious friend.

“I was only assuring you, my dear sir, that I understood your position,” said the captain.  “I see your difficulty as plainly as you can see it yourself.  Tell a woman like Mrs. Lecount that she must come off her domestic throne, to make way for a young and beautiful successor, armed with the authority of a wife, and an unpleasant scene must be the inevitable result.  An unpleasant scene, Mr. Vanstone, if your opinion of your housekeeper’s sanity is well founded.  Something far more serious, if my opinion that her intellect is unsettled happens to turn out the right one.”

“I don’t say it isn’t my opinion, too,” rejoined Noel Vanstone.  “Especially after what has happened to-day.”

Captain Wragge immediately begged to know what the event alluded to might be.

Noel Vanstone thereupon explained—­with an infinite number of parentheses all referring to himself—­that Mrs. Lecount had put the dreaded question relating to the little note in her master’s pocket barely an hour since.  He had answered her inquiry as Mr. Bygrave had advised him.  On hearing that the accuracy of the personal description had been fairly put to the test, and had failed in the one important particular of the moles on the neck, Mrs. Lecount had considered a little, and had then asked him whether he had shown her note to Mr. Bygrave before the experiment was tried.  He had answered in the negative, as the only safe form of reply that he could think of on the spur of the moment, and the housekeeper had then addressed him in these strange and startling words:  “You are keeping the truth from me, Mr. Noel.  You are trusting strangers, and doubting your old servant and your old friend.  Every time you go to Mr. Bygrave’s house, every time you see Miss Bygrave, you are drawing nearer and nearer to your destruction.  They have got the bandage over your eyes in spite of me; but I tell them, and tell you, before many days are over I will take it off!” To this extraordinary outbreak—­accompanied as it was by an expression in Mrs. Lecount’s face which he had never seen there before—­Noel Vanstone had made no reply.  Mr. Bygrave’s conviction that there was a lurking taint of insanity in the housekeeper’s blood had recurred to his memory, and he had left the room at the first opportunity.